THE INSTITUTE OF POLITICS PUBLICATIONS, WILLIAMS COLLEGE, WILLIAMSTOWN, MASS. INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS EIGHT LECTURES DELIVERED IN THE UNITED STATES IN AUGUST, 1921 BY JAMES BRYCE MODERN DEMOCRACIES HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HIS- TORY UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES IN WAR TIME STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY BIOGRAPHIES SOUTH AMERICA, OBSERVATIONS AND IMPRESSIONS INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS EIGHT LECTURES DELIVERED IN THE UNITED STATES IN AUGUST, 1921 BY JAMES BRYCE (VISCOUNT BETCH) JT3eto THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1922 All rights reserved PRINTED IN IHB UNITED STATES OF AMERICA COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY THE PRESIDENT AND TRUSTEES OF WILLIAMS COLLEGE Set up and printed. Published February, 1922. Press of J. J. Little & Ives Company New York, U. S. A. LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA BARBARA .fi DEDICATION To the Honorable CHARLES EVANS HUGHES My Dear Mr. Hughes: The interest you have taken in the Institute of Poli- tics and its aims, as well as our own long friendship, prompt me to offer to you this little book on Interna- tional Relations. You are one of those who are to-day working most earnestly and effectively for the promo- tion of cooperation and good feeling between States; and I need not say how warmly your efforts for that purpose are appreciated on this side of the Atlantic. Believe me Most truly yours, December 22nd, 1921. JAMES BRYCE. PREFACE These lectures, addressed to an audience which, though it contained professors of history and public law from many universities, was mainly non-profes- sional, do not attempt to deal with the more intricate branches of the large subject covered by the term In- ternational Relations. Now printed almost exactly as they were delivered three months ago, they treat of that subject only in a few of its broader aspects, and are directed to a practical aim which is at this mo- ment much in the minds of thoughtful men every- where. Painfully struck by the fact that while the economic relations between nations have been growing closer, and the personal intercourse between their mem- bers far more frequent, political friendliness between States has not increased, such men have been asking why ill feeling continues still so rife. Why is it that before the clouds of the Great War have vanished from the sky new clouds are rising over the horizon? What can be done to avert the dangers that are threatening the peace of mankind? This book is intended to supply some materials for answering the questions aforesaid by throwing upon them the light of history. It is History which, record- ing the events and explaining the influences that have moulded the minds of men, shows us how the world of international politics has come to be what it is. His- viii PREFACE tory is the best indeed the only guide to a compre- hension of the facts as they stand, and to a sound judg- ment of the various means that have been suggested for replacing suspicions and enmities by the cooperation of States in many things and by their good will in all. London, Dec. 22nd, 1921. CONTENTS LECTURE I. THE EARLIER RELATIONS OF TRIBES AND STATES TO ONE ANOTHER 1 Different views of primitive mankind The "state of nature" as between tribes; i.e., war is the "natural" relation of communities The theory of a Golden Age of Peace. First Period, War everywhere in early times. Second Period, An era of comparative peace under the Roman Empire The Monotheistic religions as an international force Influence of Christianity Islam. Third Period, Action of the clergy for peace; the Truce of God The Pope and the Emperor as guardians of peace Decline of ecclesiastical influence after the fourteenth century Cesare Borgia and Machiavelli Fourth Period. Wars of Religion between Christian states Plans for a general peace the Balance of Power Competition of States in seizing new countries. Fifth period, Events lead- ing up to the Great War of 1914 Decline of dynastic influences Political propaganda for international purposes The Congress of Vienna: the Holy Alliance Five great international figures The importance in history of the Individual Leader. LECTURE II. THE GREAT WAR AND ITS EFFECTS IN THE OLD WORLD ... 33 Causes that brought the War Germany and France in and after 1870 The growth of Armaments The Peace Treaties of Paris Causes of their failure to secure a real peace Germany after the War Dissolution of the Haps- burg Monarchy The New States; Austria, Czecho-Slo- vakia Frontiers of Austria and Italy: Tirol Hungary and Transylvania Yugo-Slavia, Albania Bulgaria, Ru- mania Russia and Siberia Finland, Esthonia, Latvia, Lithuania Poland and the Ukraine The Turkish Em- pireConstantinople Armenia The Further East. LECTURE III. NON-POLITICAL INFLUENCES AFFECTING INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 74 Production and industry Sources of natural -vealth Commercial and economic interests The influence of In- ix x CONTENTS ternational Trade for Peace and for War Protective Tariffs and Free Trade Trading influences as affecting Russia and Germany before 1914 Like influences as affecting the relations of England and Germany before 1914 Transportation and the routes of commerce The "Freedom of the Seas" Fishery rights Railroads Inter- national finance Loans to foreign governments and their consequences How far ought governments to inter- fere to aid traders and capitalists? "Satan's Invisible World." LECTURE IV. THE CAUSES OF WAE 112 Existing conditions in Europe Disappearance of Family Relationships as an international factor Decline of .the influence of religion on international politics Fanaticism in Muslim peoples The influence of racial sentiment Nationality as a Sentiment and a Fact Illustrations of in- fluences and conditions which create nationality Nation- ality and Liberty formerly associated, now less so The Principle of Self-Determination "Natural Boundaries" Difficulties that arise in trying to give effect to the princi- ple of Nationality International disputes arising froni the migration of the subjects of one State into the terri- tories of another Contacts of the White and the Coloured Races The influence of theoretical doctrines, on the rela- tions of States Influences making for friendship between Nations Intellectual influences as affecting or failing to affect the feelings of peoples towards one another Con- trast between the friendly feelings of individuals towards foreigners and the antagonisms of States The Politicians and the Press as influences affecting sentiment abroad Summary review of the various factors which make for amity or enmity between nations. LECTURE V. DIPLOMACY AND INTERNATIONAL LAW . . , . . . .148 Diplomatic Envoys in the past and the present The qualities needed in an Envoy The duties of Envoys and services they may render To speak the truth or to conceal it? Some dicta regarding the practice of diplo- macy The real utility of diplomatic envoys Interna- tional Law Is it fit to be called Law? "Nature" as a source of International Law Rules regarding the conduct of War Recent violations of those rules Services which International Law may render Treaties and their dura- tion Instances of the repudiation of treaties Interven- CONTENTS xi tion and Neutralization The Cooperation of States for common purposes The need for revising and amending the rules of International Law Creation of a Body for the purpose aforesaid The enforcement of International rules. LECTURE VI. POPULAR CONTROL OF FOREIGN POLICY AND THE MORALITY OF STATES 176 The demand that the People should direct foreign policy By what method can the people act for this purpose? Difficulties involved: have the people the knowledge required? Arguments for and against the change pro- posed Cases in which Popular Control may work well Will Popular Control raise the Moral Standard of State action? Why has that Standard been low? Standards why higher for Individuals than for States The Argument of State Necessity Two theories of the Duty of States What the State may not do, and will injure itself by doing There is nevertheless some difference between the duty of a State and that of an Individual. LECTURE VII. METHODS PROPOSED FOR SETTLING INTERNATIONAL CONTROVERSIES 206 Diplomatic Conferences and Congresses The Berlin Congress The Hague Conferences The Reduction of Armaments Problems involved in Reduction of Land and Sea Forces Methods for removing causes of international friction that threaten war Arbitration in the cases called "Justiciable" Instances of Wars which Judicial Arbitra- tions would not have averted Mediation or Conciliation Cases to which this method has been or might have been applied Merits of the Method How should a Concil- iating Authority be created? What functions should it have? LECTURE VIII. OTHER POSSIBLE METHODS FOR AVERTING WAR .... 235 (a) Alliances, offensive and defensive, or defensive only Rights between States inherent in such Alliances, (b) A Super-State or Federation of the World Objections to a Super-State: the differences between the Component members too great No such unity now exists as existed CONTENTS in Europe when the World State was advocated in the Middle Ages Existing States would refuse to join the contemplated Federation, (c) A Combination of Civilized States formed for the purpose of preventing war Essen- tial requisites for such a Combination Organs needed for its effective action Difficulties that might arise in its working Compulsive Methods available: the Commer- cial Boycott, or a possible resort to force Necessity for some joint action to avert war Lessons which the Great War has taught The welfare of every nation now in- volved in the welfare of others What the United States might effect for the world The need for a sense of World Citizenship Responsibility and power of every member of a Democracy. INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS OF THE OLD WORLD STATES LECTURE I INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE PAST. THE subject assigned tc me in the arrangement of the courses of lectures to be delivered to this Institute, viz. : the relations of States and peoples to one another, is one of vast extent, which covers or is closely con- nected with nearly every branch of the principal human sciences, Ethics, Economics, Law and Pol- itics. The matters with which these sciences have to deal have all of them affected the relations of inde- pendent communities, and History is a record of the phases through which these relations have passed. But the subject, although very large I might say because very large admits of being briefly treated. Since no one will expect a lecturer to enter into details, he may confine himself to mapping out the subject, drawing its general outlines, noting the salient features and the most critical issues, and examining some few of the presently urgent problems. In order to explain what the international relations of the Old World States were before the Great War and are now, I propose to devote the first two lectures to a rapid sketch of the character which relations of nations i 2 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS and States have borne in the past, so as to show what the general experience of mankind has been and through what recent experiences it reached the point at which things stood in the fateful year 1914, when the powder train that had been so long in laying was fired. In this lecture I will try to give you passing glimpses of the ancient, mediaeval, and modern world, proceeding in the next to describe the international situation when the war broke out, that we may see what were the causes and conditions which brought about that war and made it an extension unprecedented in the annals of mankind. My aim is to lay before you a statement, clear and impartial, so far as I can make it so, of Facts. Many are the theories that might be constructed, many the reflections with which the facts could be adorned, we can all spin theories and delight ourselves with re- flections at our own pleasure but before allowing our- selves such enjoyments, let us have a clear and con- nected grasp of the facts. Now and then I will ven- ture to illustrate general propositions I may have to state by referring to incidents that have come within my personal knowledge, some of which are not re- corded in books. Those whose memory goes back a long way are exposed to the danger of indulging too much in recollections of the bygone days recollec- tions which have a keen interest for those who re- member the circumstances and conditions, now for- gotten by their juniors, through which the world was traveling sixty or seventy years ago, but which are apt to be comparatively uninteresting to the present gener- ation. Nevertheless, concrete cases recollected in their environment help to illuminate. When we can INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE PAST 3 connect a general proposition with an illustrative in- stance, it seems to become more real and more fertile in suggesting lines of thought worth following. Some few words at the outset about a subject old but never yet exhausted and not likely to be exhausted, viz. : Human Nature by which I mean not merely the nature of Man, but Man as he was in a State of Nature. The significance of this point for the study of inter- national relations is that although in civilized countries every individual man is now under law and not in a State of Nature towards his fellow men, every political community, whatever its form, be it republican or monarchical, is in a State of Nature towards every other community ; that is to say, an independent com- munity stands quite outside law, each community own- ing no control but its own, recognizing no legal rights to other communities and owing to them no legal duties. An independent community is, in fact, in that very condition in which savage men were before they were gathered together into communities legally or- ganized. It is well to insist upon this point, because those who are accustomed to live in civilized communities where every citizen is subject to the law of his own com- munity, do not always realize that the Community itself is outside law altogether. It is in precisely the same condition in which stood our savage an- cestors, or rather the savage ancestors of those Indians who were here before your ancestors came, when every tribe of Algonquins or Iroquois stood in a State of Nature towards every other and had no rights and no duties and no law except what people call the Law of Force. That is exactly the position in which every 4 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS civilized community stands now. It is a law unto itself, subject to no legal control and therefore to no responsibility, except that (to be subsequently con- sidered) which the public opinion of the world imposes. Now what really was the State of Nature? There have been two theories about it, two conceptions of the facts and the forces at work, and the history of international relations records the long conflict be- tween these two views or conceptions, a conflict in which there has been and will be no victory, because each view is true, based upon facts which belong to man's mental constitution, and yet not so completely true as to exclude the truth of the other view. "War," says Plato, "is the natural relation of every community to every other" : 7r6Xe/*os vcS7ros dj>tfpd>7r Xu/cos. Many other wise men, ancient and modern, have spoken to the like effect. Yet there has been, and that from the earliest times, another view of the nature of man and of what is called the State of Nature. Over against the doctrine of the Wolf and the state of war there was also a doctrine of the Lamb and the state of peace. The poet Hesiod describes to us a Golden Age in which there was no strife, and many of you will remember that Virgil, in his famous Fourth Eclogue, amplifying the traditions of the older poets, makes the Sibyl prophesy the return of an era of un- broken peace like that which is described in the eleventh chapter of Isaiah. If the pessimist school of thinkers can point to history as a record of incessant strife, the optimist school can find in their study of man's soul and essence a basis for their hopes of betterment. INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE PAST 5 The Stoic philosophers looked upon man as a being in whom evil impulses were in constant conflict with right reason and therefore thought of him as attaining his true nature when these passions had been subdued by reason and the sense of justice. That peace in the soul which Reason ought to give seemed to them to be natural because nature tended of herself to evolve what is highest and best in man; and when that tendency had prevailed, man would be at peace with his fellows. Various thinkers in various ages have hesitated between these two conceptions or have tried to hold them altogether. In the foreground they saw man as he has shown himself in history, a creature of aggressive propensities prompting him to rob or kill, while behind these they saw an amiable vision of Man as he may once have been in an age of innocence, or as he may again be when either religion or philosophy has tamed the impulses that move him for evil. Each school of thinkers can take Nature to mean either the sum of the mental or the moral phenomena which belong to man as they have usually throughout history displayed themselves in action, or can discover in those phenomena a vital principle, the development of which, along the lines the Creator has prescribed, will by degrees subdue the lower passions and enthrone the higher passions hi power. Though I must turn away from the field of specula- tion to that of Fact, let us try to remember through the whole course of this inquiry into the relations of States to States two fundamental propositions. One is that every independent political community is, by virtue of its independence, in a State of Nature towards other communities. The other proposition is 6 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS that the prospect of improving the relations of states and peoples to one another depends ultimately upon the possibility of improving human nature itself. You may say that a sound and wide view of national in- terests, teaching the peoples that they would gain more by co-operation than by competition or by con- flict, may do much to better the relations of communi- ties. But in the last resort the question is one of the moral progress of the individual men who compose the communities. Communities are nothing at all except so many individual men, and human nature will ad- vance no further in communities taken as wholes than the members of the communities themselves advance. And this is the reason why those who seek to improve human society must begin by working as individuals; not to throw the responsibility upon the communities, but to remember that the community is what the men and women make it. Human Nature in the civilized nations and international advance can only go on if it goes on simultaneously in many nations human nature can only be raised and sustained by the effort of individuals. Can it be raised to and sustained at a higher level than it has yet attained? That is the great question, and that is the question to which I hope to return in a later lecture of this course. Now let us turn to history. The relations of nations to one another are those of War and Peace: it is of these I shall have to speak to you. Now from ancient times History shows us far more of War than of Peace. If ever there was a Golden Age, the ancients had to con- fess that there were no records regarding it, and no- where have any traces of it been discovered. When the curtain rises that curtain which conceals the INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE PAST 7 dark prehistoric past we see fighting everywhere over the earth. All the races of Europe were fighting Celts, and Iberians, and Slavs, and Teutons. Each tribe was always at war with other tribes. So were the great civilized kingdoms of antiquity, Syrians, Baby- lonians, Lydians, Medes and Persians, with wild hordes of Kimmerians and Scythians descending from time to time out of the bleak and misty North upon the lands of sunshine and wealth. All around the Mediterranean, Greek cities were living in constant conflict with one another, and the neighboring cities were the most hostile. Athens hated Megara, Thebes hated Plataea, Spartans hated and fought with Messen- ians. And this was true of Gauls and Spaniards also. These facts which ancient historians report are exactly similar to those which we know from the reports of travelers who have visited the newly dis- covered countries since the voyages of Columbus and Vasco de Gama. Everywhere war, everywhere the de- light in war. The Sioux and the Blackfeet and the Crows upon the prairies of the Missouri River fought with one another with the same fierceness as Campbells and Frasers and Macdonalds fought in Scotland upon the shores of Loch Etive and Loch Lochy. In Hawaii and in Tahiti and in New Zealand, chiefs were always at war with their neighbors. Still more ferocious upon this continent were the feuds of Mexican tribes like the Aztecs and Tlascalans with one another. It was the same in Africa, where Tshaka, the king of the Zulus, slaughtered all his neighbors eighty years ago in South Africa, playing the part there of the Mongol conqueror Timur, who was known by the piles of skele- tons that he left behind him. The only mitigations of 8 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS the all-pervading practice of strife were to be found in the protection that was accorded to heralds or messen- gers bearing what we should call a flag of truce, and in the recognition of certain customs regulating com- munications between enemies; and along with these customs in the practice of calling as witnesses to an agreement supernatural beings, such as the deities of earth and heaven, whom we find invoked in the Iliad when a truce was made between the Greeks and the Trojans, and such as the Sun and the Wind when an agreement made by Irish kings in the days of St. Patrick was placed under their protection. I mention these things because they are the first beginnings of what has been developed into a kind of international law. International law began in connection with war, because war was what brought peoples most frequently and directly into relations with one another which needed some kind of regulation. And we may perhaps add that there was even in the rudest tribes some sort of vague disapproval of certain kinds of behavior, such as the killing of prisoners by torture, massacres upon a great scale, unprovoked attacks upon a harmless tribe, the violation of a promise made in a particularly solemn way. Yet this disapproval was seldom strong enough to restrain any chief or any community that saw direct advantage to itself from high-handed aggres- sion or from a breach of faith. To the incessant bloodshed and plunder which I have described as characterizing everywhere over the world this first period of international relations, there succeeded what may be called a Second Period an age of comparative peace, and indeed the only season of widely extended peace which civilized mankind has ever enjoyed. This second period, which was on the INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE PAST 9 whole the most peaceful era the civilized peoples have ever seen, dates from a little before the beginning of our era, though not necessarily connected with it. Rome had conquered the world, as the result of a series of wars which brought the whole Mediterranean world and part of the East under her sway and she set herself in the days of Augustus to repress all strife within the limits of her realm. The absorption and unification into the gigantic Roman dominion of many kingdoms and many city states caused their in- habitants after four or five generations to begin to think of themselves as being all Romans, and gave them what would be called to-day the term is, of course, a new one a kind of Collective Nationality. This unification effected by the conquests of Rome left no international relations subsisting within the Em- pire, though such relations continued to exist with barbarous or semi-civilized peoples outside the Em- pire, such as the unsubdued Teutons In northern Ger- many, such as the Caledonians in North Britain, such as the Parthians, and afterwards the Persians, away beyond the Euphrates. This Pax Romano, was not a perfect world-peace, because there was always some fighting on the Northern, Eastern and Southern frontiers, and some internal conflicts between rival aspirants to the imperial throne. But still it was a better time than there had ever been before, or than there was to come for a long time thereafter. The most interesting feature for us moderns is that in this second period there appeared a new force which has ever since influenced the relations of states; I mean the influence of the monotheistic religions. Their action on politics is one of the most curious and note- worthy points in the whole course of the history of 10 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS the relation of states to another. The monotheistic religions, because they are monotheistic, ore mutually exclusive. In the pre-Christian world every people, however attached it was to its own deities, admitted the deities of other peoples as being equally true and equally disposed to help their votaries. Even if those deities inspired the disgust which Juvenal felt for the animal gods of Egypt, still there was no disposition to interfere with their worship, for each people had a right to its own gods, the protectors of the land they dwelt in. But the Christian church, after it had triumphed over the various idolatries older and newer in the fourth century, began to lend itself to the sup- pression of pagan rites, and still later it embarked upon a career of persecution which lasted in Spain down to the end of the eighteenth century. Everybody can see now how absolutely opposed to the teachings of the Gospel persecution was. But after the fifth century no one seems to have seen that till far down in the Middle Ages. Thus a new ground for international enmities arose. Thereafter another monotheistic re- ligion appeared in the seventh century. That was Islam. Now Islam was militant and intolerant from the very first. It did not need to decay or decline into a state of intolerance, as Christianity did, because it was meant to be intolerant. It put to the sword all idolaters, including the Fire-worshippers of Persia, who were its first victims, and it reduced the "Peoples of the Book," as the Mussulmans call the Jews and the Christians, to a subjection which left them very little except their lives. Now Christianity, being a religion of peace which preached good will among men, and a religion which INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE PAST 11 had prevailed by spiritual forces only against the physical force of the Roman imperial government, might have been expected to change the face of the world by leading the nations that accepted it to obey its precept to love one another. Its mission was to put an end to wars, at least among Christians, and its duty to the heathen was to treat them not as enemies or as wilful sinners, but as fellow-creatures who had dwelt in darkness and who were to be illumined by the soft light of the gospel. These things, however, did not come to pass. When differences of doctrine arose among Christians, they became the cause first of anger and antagonism, and presently of armed strife. The Prankish King Clovis, himself very recently and very imperfectly converted, alleged as a ground for his attack upon the Visigothic Kingdom of Aquitania that "these Arians ought not to be permitted to possess the best part of Gaul." Three centuries later Charle- magne forced Christianity upon the Saxons by the sword, and after three centuries more the Norwegian Saint Olaf earned his title of saint by no merit except that of fighting against heathens, for there was cer- tainly nothing in his character or career except fighting against heathens to justify that title. His predeces- sor, King Olaf Trygvasson, had set an example of forcible conversion by making a venomous snake crawl down the throat of a heathen chief who refused to be converted. All through the Dark Ages there was practically as much fighting between those who called themselves Christians as there had been in any previous age. The only result of the appearance of the new religion in the field of politics might seem to have been to add a 12 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS new cause for war, either against non-Christians or as between one section of Christians and another. Some- times even prelates, like Bishop Odo of Bayeux, the brother of William the Conqueror, or the Bishop of Jaen in the last war of the "Catholic Kings" Ferdinand and Isabella against the Moors of Granada, themselves took armor and fought to kill. This is perhaps the sad- dest of all the disappointments that history records. A spiritual power had arisen in the world which seemed capable of extinguishing the bad passions of mankind and the greatest evil from which civilized society had suffered, and this power did not fulfil its mission or ac- complish its task. The propensities of human nature were too strong for it. Instead of bringing together into one body men of different races and faiths, it created a distinction between those within and those without the pale which provided a reason for aggression and an excuse for ferocity. The Spanish Conquistadores in Mexico and Peru seem to have thought themselves justified in slaughtering the Indians because the Indian natives, not being Christians, were deemed to be out- side the pale and not under the protection of God. You may remember that the Dominican monk Valdes, who acted as^chaplain to Pizarro, said to the Spaniards when they were preparing for their great massacre of the Indians in the square of Caxamarca, "I absolve you, Castilians; fall on and slay." Nevertheless, the principles of the Gospel were not so completely forgotten as to make good men desist from efforts to restrain violence. At the end of the tenth century, when private war was so general over the whole European Continent that practically every layman had to put himself in a state of defence against INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE PAST 13 everybody else, French Synods began to proclaim what was called the Pax Ecclesice church peace which for- bade private war at certain periods; and some years later there was created a Truce of God, which all men were required to swear to observe during certain holy seasons and for certain days in each week. Those regu- lations, which were meant to apply to private warfare rather than to regular wars between potentates, were enforced by ecclesiastical penalties. They were con- stantly broken, so that someone remarked that as much sin was being committed by perjury as was committed by the fighting which the oaths were meant to check. Nevertheless, these attempts constituted a sort of standing testimony by the Church to the duty that was laid upon it to promote peace. These attempts usher in what we may call a Third Period. The first was that which saw endless wars in the early Mediterranean and West European world; the second was that of the Roman Empire, and this third period covered five centuries, and in it an at- tempt was made to apply Christianity to the better- ment of political relations. When the authority of the Pope as Universal Bishop became generally recognized in the West, it became part of his functions to prevent, as far as possible, international as well as private wars, and the similar, though less complete, recognition of the Emperor as the secular head and ruler of Christen- dom imposed upon the latter a like duty. This was the first serious effort ever made to treat the whole body of Christians as a single ecclesiastico-civil com- munity bound to obey two sovereigns God had placed over them, sovereigns charged with functions of main- taining order and repressing violence here on earth and 14 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS of leading men to eternal felicity thereafter. The doctrine was expounded in many books, the most famous of which two treatises well deserving to be studied at this day are the book called De Monarchia, written by Dante Alighieri, and the book called "The Defender of the Peace" Defensor Pacis, by the younger contemporary of Dante, Marsilius of Padua. No one denied this doctrine of the rights and duties of the Emperor or the Pope, but while it gave immense power to the Pope, who could inflict spiritual penalties which men feared, and who often used them with a righteous purpose, it did far less to help the Emperor, who had no correspondingly effective power; and so it happened that the authority of the latter practically disappeared after the middle of the thirteenth century. The system was grand in its conception, but it broke down when the two Supreme Powers quarreled, and for a couple of centuries they were seldom even on speaking terms. Their quarrel fatally weakened the Emperor, while temporal ambitions so invaded and corrupted the Church that the Pope and the bishops lost by degrees their moral authority and found their spiritual weapons blunted by having been frequently abused for non-spiritual ends. The high aspirations which had marked the beginning of the thirteenth century died away and before the middle of the fif- teenth a decadence had set in which seemed to threaten all the influences of Christianity upon national and international life. This decline was especially conspicuous in Italy. Religion had in Italy been formalized and divorced from ethics. The blessing of such a man as Rodrigo INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE PAST 15 Borgia, Pope Alexander VI, was still supposed to have a sort of magical effect, 1 but no one could have received from him with a grave face any exhortation to virtue, and it is fair to Pope Alexander to say that he had too much humor ever to offer such exhortations. The growth of the arts and of material prosperity had made private warfare less frequent, so there was not quite so much bloodshed and ferocity as there had been, but force and fraud were recognized as the inevitable and hardly blameworthy methods which States must em- ploy against one another. The typical representative of Italian statecraft was Cesare Borgia, one of the most interesting figures of the Renaissance, with a career typical in Italy, as that of Louis XI had been typical in France, as that of Ferdinand the Catholic was typical of the succeeding age in Spain. A manual of the applied science of statecraft was supplied by Ma- chiavelli in his book called The Prince, a work which has exposed his memory to undeserved obloquy, be- cause he did no more than describe and examine what was the accepted practice of his own time. There was nothing in the book which sovereigns had not been doing for ages, nothing which plenty of statesmen have not been doing ever since without needing to turn to Machiavelli's pages for guidance. This brings us down to the Fourth Period, which opens with the great ecclesiastical schism of the six- teenth century, for it saw the emergence of new phenomena which profoundly affected the relations of States to one another. Religious differences arising from the teachings of Luther and Zwingli and Calvin *An amusing instance may be found in Ferdinand Gregorovius' Life of Lucrezia Borgia. 16 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS created new grounds of international hostility. Protes- tant monarchs and peoples, threatening and threatened by the Catholic monarchs, quarreled with one another, till in the year 1618 their strife led to a war that dragged on for thirty years and bled Germany white, leaving her impoverished, desolate, exhausted. At last the year 1648 brought a peace which was memorable for two reasons. It was arranged at the first of those great European congresses which at Osnabriick and Miinster, thereafter at Utrecht in 1713, then again at Vienna in 1814, then at Berlin in 1878, then at Paris in 1919, assembled to settle the terms of peace after a great war. The two Treaties of Westphalia (1648) re-constituted the relations of the leading Powers for many years, laying a foundation for all subsequent efforts to determine their respective rights. These treaties turned what had been that mediaeval Empire which claimed to be Universal into a sort of Germanic Confederation, dividing central Europe into two sections, Roman Catholic and Protestant, ap- proximately equal in population and resources, so that each might hope to be able to defend itself against the other. The scheme framed for Germany became the basis for all Europe of what was called the Balance of Power. Here we touch a very important point in the evolution of international relations, because the Balance of Power was the center, or what might be called the mainspring, of European politics for more than two centuries from that date. The idea had sprung up that in order to prevent any one State from becoming strong enough to threaten the independence of other States, there must always be maintained an equilibrium between the great States. When any INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE PAST 17 monarchy, such as at one time Spain, at another Austria under the Hapsburgs (who were usually closely allied with their Spanish kindred), at another period France under Louis XIV, came to constitute a menace to its neighbors, those neighbors felt bound to form a league for their joint protection against the danger. This idea or scheme was often abused. It led to alarms that were sometimes ill-founded: it created what have been called Preventive Wars wars made to-day in order to prevent a war from being made to-morrow, efforts to repel attacks which might never have come. Thus discredited by misuse, it became a term of reproach as a delusion of kings and diplo- matists. Nevertheless there were moments, such as that when the power of Louis XIV dominated the European continent, when there really did seem to be need for a combination of other States to resist an ag- gression which would have injured peoples as well as monarchs, and the career of Napoleon Bonaparte showed that the danger was not extinct. After the fall of the Napoleonic Empire Russia became the Power which was most generally dreaded, until the Crimean War in 1853 and thereafter the war with Japan disclosed her weakness. We know what alarm the mili- tary strength of Germany began to excite among her neighbors after 1870. From the earlier years of this Fourth Period we note the beginnings of what may be distinguished as secular plans, because they differ from the ecclesi- astical plans that I have already described to prevent wars by forming combinations of independent king- doms for that purpose. In these plans there emerge rudimentary ideas of international conciliation and ar- 18 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS bitration. The incessant wars of the fifteenth century- suggested to the great Erasmus the need for some con- certed efforts to secure peace, and those of you who have not seen it may be advised to read a little book of his, published in the early sixteenth century and quite recently reprinted, called The Complaint of Peace, in which Peace personified raises her voice of lamenta- tion to say that although Christianity is her friend and advocate and everybody professes to desire her beneficent presence, she is everywhere wounded hi the house of her friends. This need for some concerted ef- fort seems to have been first suggested to the Bohemian king George Podiebrad by one of his ministers. Much later it prompted Henry IV of France or his minister Sully to devise a scheme called the "Grand Design," which contemplated a so-called "Christian Republic," to be presided over by the Romano-Ger- manic Emperor, with a Council or Perpetual Senate, consisting of sixty-four Commissioners, who were to debate questions of common interest and preserve peace by settling disputes between nations. The idea was revived later by the Abbe de St. Pierre, in France, and won sympathy from the great Leibnitz. It is to the same sense of the evils of war that we must assign thet beginnings of International Law as something more than a mere body of commercial customs. It was just before the beginning of this period that the field of international politics was enlarged by the discovery of new lands, the claims to which created fresh grounds for rivalry and strife among European potentates. When the Portuguese and Spanish naviga- tors were exploring the unknown shores of the tropical Atlantic, Pope Alexander VI issued a bull delimiting INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE PAST 19 the regions which each Power might appropriate. Presently England, Holland, and France came upon the scene, the two former disregarding the claims of Spain and Portugal, and building up colonial domin- ions for themselves. This process of appropriation, whence arose many wars, was supposed to have ended thirty years ago by the carving up of Africa into areas assigned by various treaties to France, Germany, Britain, and Italy; but still later the United States took Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Philippine Isles, and, more recently, Germany lost her recently acquired African and Oceanic possessions, which were at Ver- sailles allotted to various Powers to be administered under mandates. The only parts of the world that have not now been appropriated in some way or other by Powers belonging to the European races are China, Mongolia, Japan, Persia, Abyssinia, Siam, and some fragments of Western Asia. Even the islands of the Pacific are virtually ruled either by some white Power that is to say, a Power of European origin or by Japan. Finally, by a series of gradual changes during the nineteenth century we pass out of the Fourth Period into the Fifth, which comes down to the end of the Great War in 1918-20. It is characterized by two new phenomena of great import. The first of these new phenomena is a change and enlargement in the meaning of the word "State." During previous periods "the State" had meant, in a monarchy, the personal ruler, in republics, such as Venice, or Genoa, or Hamburg, a small ruling clique. Louis XIV, when he said, "I am the State," spoke the truth, for his per- sonal will (though of course largely guided by his 20 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS advisers) was supreme. The army and the navy and the civil service were his own, obeying his com- mands. All over Europe it was the sovereigns who made war and peace at their own pleasure, not con- sulting their peoples. Territories, passing by rules like those which in every country determine the succession to real estate, were inherited, conveyed and adminis- tered like private property. Those who served in the army and navy were everywhere regarded, and re- garded themselves, as being the servants of the Crown. Kings appointed and recalled envoys at their own sweet will and pleasure, and kings were usually, unless they were too stupid or too indolent, the directors of their own foreign policy. But in the course of the nineteenth century the personal power of the Sov- ereign waned everywhere, and what was, nominally at least, the power of the people was substituted, until at last a final blow was given to this system by the destruction in 1918-19 of the three great empires of Russia, Austria, and Germany. The other new phenomenon arises from that last mentioned. It is the growing employment of what are called "propaganda campaigns" for the diffusion of ideas and sentiments among peoples. Nations, or sections of a nation, or sections present in several nations which try to act together, endeavor to spread and win support inside or outside their own countries for the doctrines which they unite in holding and wish to diffuse in other nations. Religions or religious sects have often done this: it is now done by the votaries of political or economic doctrines also. Propaganda has this peculiar quality, that it can work by non-offi- cial methods and agencies altogether irrespective of INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE PAST 21 organized governments. Governments can resort to it, and sometimes do so, but it is also now largely used by sections of nations, and can be so used to any extent. It appeals not to force, but to opinion or prejudice. All the international relations that we have been hitherto considering were relations of force. Propa- ganda is a war on opinion by opinion, and therefore it is or may be at the same time a means of spreading useful opinion and a danger to honest opinion while al- ways a tribute to the power of popular opinion. Being an effort to make or capture opinion, it may be disin- terested, springing from a sincere faith in some princi- ple, the influence of which its votaries seek to extend. But it may be used in a less worthy spirit by any group or section of persons who have their own and possibly their selfish aims in view. The first conspicuous in- stance of it was shown in the proclamations that were issued by the French Revolutionary leaders in the European wars from 1792 onward. They sought to awaken or stimulate opinion against despots by preaching in Germany and Italy the glories of Liberty and Equality. Since those days the public opinion of the civilized peoples in general has become a powerful factor in international politics, sometimes by alarming those rulers of any particular country who have in- curred the displeasure of the bulk of opinion in other peoples, sometimes by stimulating a minority in one country to greater efforts because it counts upon sup- port from sympathizers in another country. Thus the volume of opinion which in Britain was shocked hi 1847-49 by the cruelties perpetrated by the Neapolitan government on political prisoners, and which there- after with increasing force approved the efforts of 22 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Italian patriots to free their country from domestic tyranny and from foreign rule, did much to encourage those patriots, and caused whatever influence the British government at any moment possessed to be usually exerted in favor of Italian freedom. Even as far back as the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15, and the interchanges of views and plans between the Great Powers which followed, and again in the attitude of George Canning and President Monroe and John Quincy Adams towards the insurgents in Spanish America whom the Holy Alliance wished to help Spain to reduce to obedience, the liberal sentiments which prevailed in Britain and the United States proved to be no contemptible factor in international affairs, for they were capable of influencing the action of their governments. This was true also at the time when Kossuth pleaded the cause of the Hungarian people before British and American audiences in 1850, and during the years when, between 1858 and 1860, the Austrians and the petty princes of Italy were being ex- pelled from their dominions in that country. Three other more recent illustrations are worth noting, for they help to explain three kinds of propa- ganda which are being employed to-day, different in aims, but similar in method. The first is that of those revolutionaries in Continental Europe who, rejecting patriotism and nationality, seek to spread, some of them Anarchist, others Communist doctrines. The former hope to destroy all existing States, and the very notion of any compulsory power vested in the State. The latter propose to transform all existing States by turning them into huge industrial coopera- tive societies in which there shall be no property and only one class, the so-called Proletarian. Both these INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE PAST 23 propagandas justify and zealously practice the use of force, but both aim at success by appealing also to opinion. Another species of propaganda is ethnological, a curious recent invention. It is an appeal to the senti- ment of racial solidarity in a people which is politi- cally divided up, living under the dominion of sev- eral States. Pan-Slavism used to be preached both in Russia itself and by Russians in countries with a Slavonic population, such as Serbia and Bosnia, the idea being that all the Slavonic peoples should, so far as possible, unite themselves as one under the patronage of Russia, the greatest Slavonic state. The idea of what is called Pan-Turanianism, the notion of a union of Asiatic peoples speaking languages of an agglutinative type, such peoples as Turks and other Tartars, Kirghizes, Kalmuks, and so forth, seems to have been invented by some German savant as a weapon to be used against Russia as well as against the Christian races of the Near East. Some few Germanized Turks, like that varnished ruffian Enver Bey, tried to employ it in the Great War, but as far as one can gather it has been pretty nearly crushed out between the Communist propaganda of the Bol- sheviks on the one hand and the Pan-Islamic propa- ganda of the Turks on the other. Pan-Islamism, the third kind of propaganda, and the largest and the most formidable, is an attempt to renew the original aggressive movement of the Muslim peoples against the Christian, and in particular to strengthen the Turkish Sultan by exalting him as Khalif of the whole Mohammedan world, a plan due to the restless ambi- tion of Abdul Hamid, who tried to rehabilitate an almost extinct title and claim of a semi-religious kind 24 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS in order to repair the Turkish loss of military strength, and sent his emissaries into India in order to create dis- affection to the British Government, which had begun to press him for better treatment of the Eastern Christians under his abominable rule. The Khalif literally successor is not, as some have sought to represent him, a spiritual authority like the Pope, but primarily a leader of Muslim hosts in war and a leader in public prayers in the Mosque. He may be deposed and Abdul Hamid was in fact at last de- posed for a breach of the Sacred Law. All these efforts, official and non-official, spring out of the emancipation of the masses of the people from the control of their former rulers and the consequent desire to capture public opinion. It has now become worth while to appeal to the peoples. As long as the monarchs had the sole or even the usually predominant, power, it was not the peoples that were thought of, but the sovereigns. That is to say, modern propaganda is an attempt to turn to account that deliverance of the peoples from the habit of unreasoning obedience which made the masses, formerly indifferent to politics, acquiescent in whatever international action their Governments chose to take. All the kinds of propa- ganda described resemble one another in transcending national boundaries and in creating a fanaticism which may be just as unreasoning as, and more dangerous than, obedience used to be. I have referred to the Congress of Vienna. It, and 4he Holy Alliance to which it gave birth, deserve a word of further mention, because they embody yet an- other attempt to create a system for the prevention of wars. This time the attempt was made by a secular INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE PAST 25 instead of an ecclesiastical authority, but it was made after the fall of Napoleon, in the name and under the then dominant influence of the Emperor Alexander I of Russia, and of those two much less interesting po- tentates, the Emperor of Austria and the King of Prussia. That which these three Emperors proposed to do sounds very curious when read to-day. They declared solemnly before the world that they "take for their sole guide the precepts of justice, Christian charity and peace as being the only means of con- solidating human institutions and remedying their im- perfections," with much more to the like effect; and they go on to say that "they will themselves put these principles in practice both towards their subjects and towards one another." These three exalted beings who proposed to guide the world to justice and peace were, in fact, very fallible human creatures, two of them by no means models of virtue. It is right to say that the Tsar Alexander had a quick and mobile intelligence, and also, mingled with his vanity, a really philan- thropic spirit. How the Holy Alliance failed you all know. It was based upon that illusion of the divine right of kings which had in the sixteenth century replaced the older illusion of the divine commission given to the Roman Emperor, and it was an illusion which would have needed angels instead of weak and selfish men to put its principles into practice. Intrigues and jealousies raged among the members of the Congress at Vienna, and their divergent interests soon drew them apart. England, which had never been a member of the Holy Alliance, soon found herself in opposition to the anti- liberal policies of the three Emperors, and she, acting 26 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS with the United States, checked their plans for helping Spain to crush her revolting colonists and reestablish despotism in the New World. That was the last effort to create peace on the basis of autocratic doctrine thinly disguised under the robe of religion. To complete this brief sketch of the Fifth Period and before I proceed to describe the existing relations of civilized States, some few sentences may be given to five prominent figures who did most, either by the work they achieved, or by the example they set, to make Europe what it was in 1914. These five typify in a striking manner the diverse tendencies that were at work in the revolutionary period that began with 1789 and their careers show how greatly individual men affect the march of events. Of these international men two were ministers of monarchies, two were revolutionaries, and one was both a revolutionary and a monarch. That was Na- poleon Bonaparte, whose place in modern history would be as great as that of Julius CaBsar in ancient history if the world had not grown so much wider in the seventeen centuries that separated the Roman hero from the Corsican. Napoleon changed the face of European politics as Caesar had done when he con- quered Gaul, when he impinged upon Germany and Britain and assured the supremacy of Rome around the Mediterranean. No single man since Dr. Martin Luther had done so much to influence^, the march of events as Bonaparte did between his first Italian cam- paign hi 1796 and his failure against Russia in 1812. In France he rebuilt the fabric of administration. Clear- ing the ground in Germany and Italy, he gave a death blow to what remained of feudalism, and he awakened INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE PAST 27 the peoples to a desire for freedom and a sense of na- tionality which he had no intention to inspire. Show- ing what might be effected by a highly trained army in the hands of a military genius, he made the attain- ment of a world-dominion seem possible, a deadly ambition to implant in any military chief or militant nation that might follow, and set therewith an example of an absolute disregard of good faith and ruthless indifference to human life which brought the standard of international conduct to a point almost lower than that at which the Prussian Frederick II had left it. Not only did the victories of the revolutionary armies disclose the weakness of the old monarchies and de- prive them of the respect they had received from their subjects, but the monarchs themselves lost moral au- thority as persons. The subjects saw the selfishness and turpitude of those who as heads of ancient and famous dynasties had been credited with a sense of dignity and honor, and the glamor of reverence faded. The Corsican adventurer had torn the veil away, and sovereigns had grovelled before him. The second great figure is Bismarck. He, too, was daring, and successful by his daring; almost as un- scrupulous in his methods as Napoleon, though far more unselfish in his aims, and rather less false in his dealings. Superior to Napoleon in his perception of what was and what was not attainable, he effected the unification of Germany and created afresh the domin- ance of Prussia by sagacious foresight and by a skilful use of the sentiment of national pride, using alternately an adroit diplomacy and an overwhelming military force. Though he never concealed his contempt for constitutional doctrines and the rights of legislatures 28 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS his services to the nation made him popular, and justi- fied his methods in the nation's eyes. But and here again he may be compared to Napoleon he did a dis- service to his own country by the pernicious precedents he' set. Those traditions of unscrupulous craft which, practiced by Frederick II, Bismarck inaugurated afresh and invested with the fascination of success, captivated the mind of his nation. The men into whose weaker hands the conduct of policy fell imitated his boldness but forgot his prudence, because they had not his gift for grasping the totality of the European situation. But though much of the work which Bismarck accom- plished by his diplomatic arts was undone by his suc- cessors, it is probable that in the future the chief part of it may remain, and it is also possible that in the future his example may become a warning instead of a lure. The three other international men who adorned the last generation must not be forgotten. Cavour was a practical statesman, not inferior to Bismarck in his power of seeing what was possible and in choosing the means to compass it. He, more than any other states- man, brought about the unity of Italy, doing his work in a patriotic spirit, not without guile he confessed it himself but perhaps with no more guile than the character of Louis Napoleon and the other men he had to deal with might seem to excuse. Kossuth, too, like Cavour, was a patriot, and would have created or re-created a free Hungary but for the irresistible horde of Russian invaders launched against her by the Tsar Nicholas I. Old men among you in America can still remember the impression which the stately presence and impassioned eloquence of the INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE PAST 29 exiled Hungarian leader made upon them as upon English audiences. I remember very well the en- thusiasm aroused in Glasgow by a speech he made there hi 1850. And late hi life, when he was past eighty years of age, I saw him again, and admired afresh his undimmed intellectual force and the old air of lofty dignity. Mazzini, whom also it was my privilege to know, was an idealist, far higher in quality than most states- men and with a greater power of influencing men through their best emotions than most idealists have had. He appealed to the deepest feelings and stirred the noblest hopes of his countrymen, preaching a gospel of liberty and a brotherhood of peace among the peoples whom he sought to liberate. His amis were not attained in the form he desired. Well do I recall the vehemence with which he insisted that the monarchy of the House of Savoy, which had already, when I saw him, embraced all Italy except Rome, could never accomplish for Italy what he believed a republic would accomplish. The behavior of the free peoples under republican as well as under monarchical forms has not verified Mazzini's hopes, but the impulse he gave supplied the motive power which the practical statesmen like Cavour employed, and his writings may yet help to inspire some later generation. I note the careers of these men as instances to show how large is the unpredictable element in the field of international as well as in that of domestic politics. Modern writers claiming to be scientific try to repre- sent general causes as everything and the individual great man as no more than some particular being in whom the general tendencies of an age find practical 30 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS expression. "If these tendencies," they say, "had not been embodied in Bonaparte or in Bismarck or in Cavour, they would equally well have been embodied in and given force to some other personality." History contradicts that assumption. The man who gives ef- fect to the tendencies may make all the difference, and the coming of the man is unpredictable. Crises arrive when some leader in the sphere of thought, like Maz- zini, or in the sphere of action, like Bismarck, is needed to personify and carry to success the effort an age seems to be making. Sometimes the man appears, but far more frequently the man does not appear and that which he might have done is not achieved. Had there been no Bismarck and no Mazzini we should have seen to-day a very different Europe. Had there been Bis- marcks and Cavours and Mazzinis since A.D. 1900 we should have seen a very different Europe to-day. All calculations, all predictions must leave a wide margin for the influence which the presence of some powerful personality may exert. The fact that the ultimate source of power resides in the people often obscures the fact that in all political action, and especially in foreign relations, the people as a whole I say this less of your country than I say it of Europe, but there is some truth in it everywhere in all political action, and especially in foreign relations, the masses of the people have com- paratively little knowledge and even less initiative. Broadly speaking, the people are what their leaders make them. Under every political constitution that has ever been devised the Many are inspired and led by the Few. Indeed, the larger the mass, the fewer are those to whom it looks and whom it follows, for the less the mass knows of the real facts and the really INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE PAST 31 significant issues, the more must it depend on promi- nent individual men for guidance; and the fewer are the prominent figures that can be watched and judged. How are the people to judge of the men whom they are to trust and follow unless they can constantly watch them? How can the people watch them unless they have time to do so? How can the people judge of their actions in foreign relations unless they under- stand those foreign relations themselves and see whether the men are guiding wisely or not? Never- theless, however little international issues are within the knowledge of the Average Man, the Average Man must trust somebody. In a wood any trail is better than no trail at all, for it promises to lead you out somewhere. He who scrambles wildly over the rocks and through the thick bushes may go round and round and arrive nowhere. When one traverses after night- fall a dangerous mountain path the local peasant who knows something about the path must be followed, whatever the risks. He may miss his way, he may conceivably wish to lead you astray, but if you have no knowledge of your own, it is safer to follow him rather than grope in the dark among precipices. European peoples, as we shall presently see, have been groping in the dark for the last three years, and their relations to one another during and since the War have been left to a few guides. How these guides attempted to deal with these relations, and with what success, we must now proceed to inquire. I shall endeavor in the next lecture to give you some few facts regarding the political condition of the Old World States at the beginning of the Great War and at its end also, so far as it can be said to have ended, 32 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS and we shall then have some materials for judging whether the wisdom with which international relations need to be handled has grown with the progress of the years. LECTURE II THE GREAT WAR AND ITS RESULTS. THE last lecture brought us down to our time, that is, to the beginning of the Great War in 1914. Let us now see what were the events and the forces that had led or driven Europe to the verge of the abyss into which her nations plunged in that awful year. The plunge was sudden, but the propulsive forces had been long at work. The direct occasion and proximate cause of the war was the murder of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand at Sarajevo, followed by the ulti- matum which the Austrian Government delivered to the Serbian; but the real sources of strife lay deeper and the study of them must begin by a study of the conditions hi Germany, which had been since the days of Charles V the political centre of Europe. The mighty German nation which had so recently as 1871 become one State had come to hold a position which af- fected the relations of all the other countries to one another. The Napoleonic wars had shattered its an- cient and outworn territorial arrangements, and it found itself in the year 1848, the Year of Revolutions which some of you may be old enough to remember and down till 1864, when the war of the Germanic Confederation against Denmark opened a new era, divided into two groups or sections, the Germanic parts of Austria, with a number of the minor States, forming one group, calling themselves the "Great Germans" 33 34 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS (Grosse Deutscheri), while the other group, headed by Prussia, including others of the minor States, were called by their opponents the "Little Germans," i.e., those who held that a united German State would get on better with Austria outside it rather than within it. The growing passion for National Unity, no less than the ambitions of the Prussian king and aristocracy, who protested against the leadership claimed by the Hapsburg dynasty, more ancient but more sluggish and unprogressive than the Prussian Hohenzollerns, led to the war of 1866, which brought about, along with the exclusion of Austria from Ger- many, the break-up of the Germanic Confederation and the creation of a North German League dominated by Prussia. Though this League was a matter of purely German concern, against which other Powers had no right to protest, Louis Napoleon, supported for once by French opinion as a whole, saw in it a menace to France, which feared the creation of a great State whose army had shown, in its brilliant victories over Austria, the amazing military efficiency it had attained. The old suspicions which the German and French peo- ples had entertained of one another as far back as the days when Louis XIV seized Alsace were suddenly in- tensified. It was this alarm which France felt at the rise of a formidable neighbor, together with the con- comitant belief in Germany that Louis Napoleon was contemplating an attack upon Prussia before she had completely absorbed the other German States, that precipitated the war of 1870. Well remembering the events of that fateful year, in the autumn of which I was traveling in America, I feel able to say that both in the United States and in THE GREAT WAR AND ITS RESULTS 35 England the French Emperor, long deemed the dis- turber of the peace of Europe, was regarded as the aggressor, and that in consequence the sympathy of the large majority of Englishmen and of Americans went with Germany at the outbreak of the war. In 1914 most Englishmen and Americans had forgotten these facts, and they saw in the behavior of the Prus- sian Government in 1870 only an anticipation of the action of that Government in 1914, totally different as the circumstances were on the two occasions. For a decade before 1870 American and English Liberals looking upon Louis Napoleon as the standing danger to the peace of Europe expected his overthrow to usher in an era of tranquillity. Italy had been unified, her national aspirations satisfied, all was going well with her. Might not the same happy result be expected from the recognition of the principle of nationality in Germany? This difference between the two outbreaks of war needs to be remembered. English Liberals, drawing a parallel between the cases of Germany and Italy, they extended the same sympathy to the desire of the Germans to be united in a single free State that they had long been giving to a similar effort in Italy. Liberal principles had been making way in Germany up to 1864 and seemed likely to gain further strength. Why should France fear a free Germany? This was also the general sentiment in America. Few, if any, foresaw the course things were destined to take. Who could have supposed that German liberalism would wither away under the influence of victories and the military spirit victories fostered? How fallible are the human judgments even when 36 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS those from whom they proceed are impartial specta- tors! When in 1871, at the end of the war, Germany took away from France Alsace and part of Lorraine, a new and abiding source of hostility was created. Though the great bulk of the population of Alsace was Teutonic in blood and speech, the annexation was unwelcome even to the bulk of the Teutonic element. Yet it might, perhaps, have in course of tune been ac- quiesced in by the Alsatians had not the German Government committed two fatal errors after the an- nexation. Its severe rule in Alsace kept the in- habitants disaffected, and, knowing that France would seek to recover the lost provinces, it from time to tune threatened her and sometimes, as in 1875, seemed to contemplate armed aggression. This, coupled with the rapid growth of population and wealth in Germany, drove France to seek support elsewhere. She found it in Russia, which had become alienated from Ger- many after the fall of Bismarck, while the German Government, after it had lost Russian friendship, strengthened itself by alliances with Austria and Italy. All these five Powers went on increasing their armies by imposing a practically universal compulsory service on their inhabitants, and when Germany began to create a strong navy, England, in which there had been theretofore no antagonism to the Germans, took alarm and set about increasing her fleet, conceiving that as she had only a very small army and did not produce enough grain to feed her people, she must make herself absolutely safe against invasion and against the risk of a blockade which might starve her people. Attempts made to bring about an intermission of the building THE GREAT WAR AND ITS RESULTS 37 of warships failed, and suspicion became in both coun- tries more acute. Before the end of the nineteenth century the enor- mous expansion of naval and military armaments was not only beginning to drain the resources of the six great nations, but was keeping them in a state of perpetual anxiety. Attempts were made at two Hague Conferences to reduce this tension, and to provide better means for the settling of international disputes. These seemed to promise a measure of success, but the causes which made France and Russia suspicious of German and Austrian designs were not such as any Court of Arbitration could deal with, for they raised no legal or so-called "justiciable" issues; nor could any mediation induce either the Russian or the Aus- trian Government to agree to a scheme which would remove the causes of trouble which distracted South- eastern Europe, where rival nations Serbs, Bulgars, Greeks and Rumans had each its aspirations and found in Austria or in Russia support for its claims. The tension remained. Europe found itself on the edge of a catastrophe, and at last the catastrophe came out of an event the murder of the heir to the throne of Austria which was the work of a group of irre- sponsible ruffians. That which had been making the crash inevitable was the mind or rather, perhaps, the temper and nervous excitability of the parties con- cerned. The growth of armies had produced a large military and naval caste, a great profession in which the habit of thinking about war had in some countries grown to be a mental obsession, almost a disease. The 38 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS building up of huge armies and navies had created the desire to use them. Shakespeare has said : "How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds Makes ill deeds done." It was natural that Generals and Admirals always occupied with drilling and manoeuvres and the study of battles and campaigns should grow weary of waiting for an opportunity that seemed never to arrive of turning their knowledge to account and putting their theories to the test of practice. They were like dogs trained to hunt but kept always on the leash. Would you be surprised if a football team constantly practis- ing, but never allowed by the college authorities to go forth to contend against another team from another college, should some day break loose and seek out an- tagonists equally impatient? So long as powerful naval and military castes exist, it will be hard to keep down armaments. The narrow avoidance of war on several occasions had left the governments and the military castes not more, but from year to year less pacific in spirit, for there was no will to peace. Any spark was enough to fire the train. Fear, moreover, was added. Russia and Germany each feared the other, each dreaded a sudden attack by the other. Let us allow to the Ger- mans the benefit of that consideration. They really were in bona fide terror of what Russia might do and thought that their chance was to strike at Russia be- fore the onslaught which they certainly expected from her had actually materialized. Each Government was supported by the mass of popular opinion. Each felt impelled to strike before the enemy whose attack it feared had carried preparations further. THE GREAT WAR AND ITS RESULTS 39 After the War came the settlement by the repre- sentatives of the victorious Powers assembled at Paris, not a fortunate spot for the deliberations on which they were entering. Of them and of the methods they employed this is not the place or the time to speak. You have all read the books which have been written, both about the war and about the negotiations at Paris. You have believed some things and you have dis- counted other things. This certainly may be said: The work that was done by the representatives of the Powers assembled at Paris has received in Europe little but censure. There are some people who like some parts of the treaties, but I know of no person who has ever praised any treaty as a whole ; indeed there seems to be no treaty that has not received far more blame than praise from any competent authority. Comparing these treaties negotiated at Paris with those which were framed by the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15, Euro- pean critics I am not here giving my own opinions, but trying to represent to you what one hears from all parts of Europe European critics observe that the men at Vienna, the Tsar Alexander, Metternich, Hardenberg, Castlereagh, Talleyrand and the rest of them, may have had bad principles and employed despotic methods and disregarded or misconceived the interests of their peoples, but at any rate they knew what they were doing and they gave effect to their principles. Their work, after all, bad as it was, be- stowed upon Europe a tolerable peace which lasted for more than thirty years. But there is not one of the treaties of 1919-20 which is not already admitted to need amendments. Some are utterly condemned by results already visible. Some are seen to be leading 40 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS straight to future wars. One hears people say all over Europe: "The sort of peace that these negotiations have given us is just as bad as war." With these strictures and with many others you are familiar, and you will judge for yourselves how far they are deserved. But let a word be said in extenua- tion, indicating reasons why some compassion should be shown to these much-criticised plenipotentiaries. Let us as against these severe judgments give con- sideration to the difficulties which faced the negotia- tors at Paris. The men at Vienna had a common ground in their faith in monarchical principles and in their reliance upon military force to carry out their principles. They had only monarchs to consider, not peoples, and they could do what they thought best for the interest of those whom they served. But the ne- gotiators of Paris differed in their principles and ideas, and not all of them seem to have believed in the princi- ples they professed. Some European critics have sug- gested that there were among them persons who thought that they must play down to their own electorates and regard not altogether what ought to be done but also perhaps even more what would ad- vantage them in their next electoral campaign. Popular prejudices, popular passions and cupidities, had to be humored or gratified. Moreover and this is an excuse which must not be lightly brushed aside the task before them was one of unprecedented difficulty. New States had to be created, territories redistributed, indemnities secured, and all upon a scale incomparably greater than any international conference or congress had ever before THE GREAT WAR AND ITS RESULTS 41 attempted to deal with. A task so great needed not politicians of the usual type, but persons of the quali- ties which it is the fashion to call those of the Super- man. We are all supposed to know, vaguely at least, what the Superman is. Taking the term in its best sense, Supermen were needed men who possessed wide vision, with a calm judgment raised above the revengeful passions of the moment, men loving justice and seeking for justice, looking beyond the present to the future, seeking the good of mankind as well as the temporary advantage of their respective nations; men who were able to appreciate the workings of those bet- ter forces which alone can bring peace and reconcile- ment to a distracted world. Such men did not appear. Why should they have appeared? Why should they have been expected? There is no saying more false than that which declares that the Hour brings the Man. The Hour many and many a tune has failed to bring the Man, and never was that truth more seen than in the last seven years. To describe the existing relations between the Great States of the Old World as settled by the Paris Conference for I leave their proposals for securing the future peace of the world and their scheme of Mandates to be considered later it is convenient to begin with the four great Empires which were between 1914 and 1919 either destroyed or divided, viz.: Russia, Germany, Austria and Turkey, and to explain what is the attitude to one another and to their neighbors in which each of the States now created out of these four Empires stands. My aim is to convey to you, in the briefest outline, an impression of the position in which 42 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS the European peoples find themselves, of the feelings they entertain towards one another and of the conse- quences to be expected from these feelings. Do their emotions tend towards war or towards peace, or shall we see prolongation of that intermediate state of suspicion and preparation for war which is almost as bad as actual conflict? First, a word as to Germany, which though reduced in area is still Germany, still a mighty nation, full of in- tellectual force united by a strong national sentiment. Germany, which continues to call herself the Reich (the Realm), albeit now a republic instead of a mon- archy, is the most populous of European countries after Russia, with inhabitants industrious as well as highly educated and with great productive industries. Be- tween her and France the ancestral antagonism, dating back to the day of Louis XIV's aggressions, is now more bitter than ever, and seems likely to last in France as long as the French generation lives which remembers the devastations wrought in 1918 by the re- tiring German armies, and to last in Germany at least as long as her government continues to pay immense sums in reparations and indemnities for the losses which the Allies suffered in the war. Dissatisfaction has been freely expressed in France that the Treaty of Versailles did not detach from the German realm and assign to France all the German-speaking lands west of the Rhine. It is argued that their possession would have secured to the French strategic advantages, as well as the industrial benefits which the soil and the minerals of those lands offered. But it may be doubted whether France would not have suffered THE GREAT WAR AND ITS RESULTS 43 more politically than she could have gained materially by a repetition of the error which Germany committed when she annexed Alsace and part of Lorraine in 1871, for the population of the Germanic territory taken would have been disaffected, and no German would have ceased to plan and work for the recovery of what are, upon the principle of nationality, purely German lands. Some have argued that as France desired to keep Germany weak lest she should again become formidable, it might have been a more promising policy to dismember the Realm in the hope that dis- memberment would revive the old "particularistic" spirit among the German populations, and thus keep the Southern States, such as Bavaria, Saxony and Wiirtemberg, from seeking reunion with the other Ger- man regions. Plans were suggested by which the ex- periment might have been tried, though clearly op- posed as it was to the principles enounced in the well known Fourteen Points. But there was little prospect of ultimate success before it. This war has shown one unprecedented feature, painful in the prospect it opens. The victors bear as much resentment against the vanquished as the van- quished do against the victors. I say "unprecedented," for I can recall no similar case, though not venturing to say that none has existed. There is no blacker cloud, pregnant with future storm, hanging over Europe now than that which darkens the banks of the Rhine. Not even after Jena in 1806, not even after Gravelotte and Sedan, and the capitulation of Paris in 1871, has the prospect of reconcilement between the two neighbor peoples seemed so distant. All the gov- 44 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS ernments committed grave strategic and still graver political errors during the war, but none seems likely to prove more deplorable in its results than the devasta- tion ordered by the German High Command while its armies were retreating in 1918. Into the tangled question of indemnities and their mode of payment I will not enter. Enough to say that though everyone agrees that the claim to indemnities is based on principles not contested and often applied before, it remains doubtful what will be Germany's ability to pay. The name "Austria" has now, by the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, returned to its original meaning as denoting the two archduchies of Upper and Lower Austria (the East March of the old Romano-Germanic Empire in the eleventh century), to which were added later Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, Tirol and Salzkammergut. These countries, largely mountainous, do not provide sufficient food for their in- habitants, and have little beyond timber and some min- erals to export. Productive manufacturing industry was concentrated in Vienna, which supplied goods to all parts of the Monarchy, as well as (in some lines of trade, such as glass and fine leather work and up- holstery) to foreign countries also. Before the peace negotiations began at Versailles, the non-German parts of the Austrian dominions had revolted. Bohemia and Moravia were predominantly Czech in population, Croatia, Dalmatia, Bosnia, half of Istria and Carniola were Slavonic, as was Galicia also. The Treaty of St. Germain made with Austria recognized these ac- complished facts, which were in accordance with the principles of nationality, and proceeded to determine THE GREAT WAR AND ITS RESULTS 45 the frontiers of the greatly reduced Austria (now a Re- public) and of the new republics which were creating themselves out of the large so-called Austria, or rather Austrian half of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, which had existed before 1914. In the case of the re- public of Czecho-Slovakia, the boundaries of the an- cient kingdom of Bohemia were adhered to on the North and Southwest, although such a frontier in- cludes several millions of men who speak German and deem themselves Germans. This departure from the principle of nationality may, perhaps, be defended on the ground both of antiquity and of the difficulty of de- parting from the so-called "natural frontier" which is indicated by the mountain masses of the Riesen Gebirge on the Northeast, of the Erz Gebirge on the Northwest, and the Bohmer Wald on the South; and Professor Masaryk, the President of the Czecho- slovak Republic, one of the three great men whom the war has brought to the front, and a man whose declarations may be trusted, has declared the wish of his State to treat, as it will be true wisdom for it to do, the German element with full friendliness and justice. It is, nevertheless, possible that difficulties may here- after arise from the desire of that element to be added to their Germanic brethren on the other side of the mountains. In Carinthia, where the German popula- tion is mingled with a Slavonic (Slovene) population, the expedient of a popular vote or so-called Plebiscite was fitly resorted to, under the supervision of persons appointed by the Allies and the expression by the ma- jority of its wish to be included in Austria has been judiciously respected. The third question that arose related to the frontiers 46 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS of Austria and Italy. Italy may well be held entitled to claim that the territories which lay along the Carnic or so-called Dolomite Alps, away to the northeast of Venice, should be included within her limits, because, although those territories contain a certain Slavonic element, the line of the Carnic Alps does furnish a con- venient defensible frontier, and the possession by a possibly hostile Power of districts on the Italian slope had long constituted a menace to Italy. But now we come to another and very different case. That is the case of Tirol. The territory which used to stand on our maps as Tirol consisted of two parts, one, the old County (Grafschaft) of Tirol (so called from an ancient castle near Meran), which passed by in- heritance to the Hapsburg family in A.D. 1335, the other the bishopric of Trent, which comprised the lower valley of the river Adige before it enters the Lake of Garda, together with some tributary valleys (Val di Non, Val di Sole and Val Sugana), lying northwest and northeast of the cathedral city of Trent and subject to its bishop. Of these two territories the latter is en- tirely Italian speaking, and was justly claimed by and allotted to Italy. 1 The foreign region, however, is, except as respects a very small area on its southern border, where the Italian-speakers predominate, a German-speaking land, and in no part of the Austrian dominions had there been a stronger loyalty to the house of Hapsburg, nor was there when the war ended a more fervid patriotism and more determined will to share the fortunes of Germanic Austria. Nevertheless, *I omit many details, for to deal with them would lead me far from the main lines of the settlement to be described. THE GREAT WAR AND ITS RESULTS 47 the Italian government put forward a claim to annex all that part of Tirol proper (the ancient county) which lies south of the main chain of the Rhaetic and Noric Alps, alleging that they needed that lofty chain as a strategic frontier, although in point of fact the configuration of the watershed and the valleys would have given Italy a more defensible frontier further south, at the defile of Klausen. Italy had, of course, no historical title whatever to the purely Germanic region she sought to acquire. However, the principle of Nationality was, in this case, thrown overboard by the Allied Powers, and a quarter of a million of German Tirolese, countrymen of the national hero, Andreas Hofer, who had led their forefathers in a gallant resistance when Napoleon transferred them to Bavaria in 1805, were handed over to Italy as if they had been so many cattle. England and France defended their action in agreeing to this breach of principle by pleading a secret treaty in which they had promised this territory to Italy in 1915, when they were endeavoring to induce her to enter the war on their side. It was a promise that ought never to have been made. The other Allied Powers had no such excuse to offer, and do not seem to have offered any. 1 Whether they did not know what they were doing or whether they knew but did not care has not been announced. * It may be added that the strategic arguments, whatever they may be worth, which the Italian Government alleged in 1915 for desiring to have the Brenner frontier against Austria, lost their force when Austria sank from being a Great Power with fifty millions of people to a petty State of six and a half millions. 48 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Vorarlberg, a small mountainous region on the east- ern bank of the Rhine before it enters the Lake of Con- stance, and one which has usually been treated as part of Tirol, expressed its wish, after the collapse of the Hapsburg monarchy, to be admitted as a Canton into the Swiss Confederation which it adjoins, but the Swiss Government did not accept the offer, opinion in Switzerland being divided on the subject, and opposi- tion on the part of France apprehended on the ground that the annexation might strengthen the German ele- ment in Switzerland. In point of fact, it would have been rather to the advantage of all the Allied Powers to have allowed Vorarlberg to go to Switzerland, in which event it would have shared the neutrality which Switzerland enjoys, rather than to have left it in an economic situation which forces it to desire union with Germany. Here it may be noted that the Treaty of St. Germain forbids Austria as a whole to unite her- self with Germany, a disregard of the so-called princi- ple of Self-Determination which the Allied Powers justified on the ground that such a union would strengthen Germany. The Tirolese have recently taken a popular vote by which they expressed a wish to be joined to Germany, but there is no present likeli- hood that this wish will be regarded, so this question remains to cloud the prospects of future tranquillity. No part of Europe, except, of course, Russia, has fallen since the end of the war into a state of poverty and misery so pitiable as has Austria, and especially the once proud imperial city of Vienna. The severe terms of the Treaty of St. Germain, treating her with her greatly reduced resources as liable for a very large part of the sum due for reparations and indemnities by THE GREAT WAR AND ITS RESULTS 49 the old monarchy, piled on her a load of debt so far exceeding her capacity to pay that the currency sank to less than one per cent of its former value, and the starving population of the towns (especially of Vienna) has been kept alive by charitable gifts from Great Britain and America. No voice has, so far as I know, ever been raised in any of the Allied countries, and certainly not in the United States or Britain, to justify the harsh, not to say cruel, terms of that treaty. The economic difficulties were aggravated by the stoppage of the supplies of coal and food which Vienna had formerly received from Bohemia, Moravia, Hun- gary and the now emancipated Slavonic regions on the South. These countries ceased after 1918 to export to Austria, and it is only recently that some coal has begun to come from Czecho-Slovakia. This misfor- tune might have been averted had the Allied Powers made it a condition of their recognition of the new States that they should impose no regulations prevent- ing free trade between themselves and Austria, which they had been wont to supply with what she needed, receiving from Vienna manufactured goods in return. Conditions of permanent peace, with a promise of a return to normal relations, economic and diplomatic, cannot be expected until these questions of commer- cial intercourse have been adjusted. The British Gov- ernment and the French Government have now begun to recognize the seriousness of the situation, and have recently arranged a conference to be held between these former Austrian states and Austria in order to rectify, if possible, these mistakes, committed when the treaty was made. Hungary, the other half of the Austro-Hungarian 50 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Monarchy as it stood before 1914, had been an inde- pendent State ever since the Magyars, a Finnic people from the borders of Europe and Asia, entered the Middle Danube Valley in the end of the ninth century, and came within the circle of European civilization under their first Christian king (St. Stephen) in the beginning of the eleventh. Before the war she, with Transylvania, constituted an independent king- dom under a Hapsburg king. It had a population of seventeen millions, but of these not more than half were of Magyar blood and speech, the rest belonging to various other races, Slovaks in the Northwest, Ruthenes (a Slavonic race) in the Northeast, Rumans in parts of the East and of Transylvania, and Serbs hi those southern districts which border on Serbia, There was, therefore, a case for detaching from the central, purely or predominantly Magyar, part of Hungary those surrounding regions in which any of the other above named races was evidently more numerous than were the Magyars, at least if the members of any such race showed a wish to be detached. The Powers as- sembled at Paris, however, went much further. By the Treaty of Trianon they took from Hungary large districts in the south in which the Slavonic and Hun- garian elements were nearly equal. They took from her in the northwest tracts in which Slovaks did not substantially outnumber Magyars, including the uni- versity city of Pressburg or Poszony, the ancient capital of the country. They took away the Ruthenian dis- tricts in the northwest without, so far as I have been able to ascertain, taking adequate measures to learn the wishes of the Ruthenian people itself, alleged by the THE GREAT WAR AND ITS RESULTS 51 Magyars to desire the maintenance of its connection with them ; and they cut off from Hungary large regions in the east, in parts of which the Magyars constituted a majority, as well as the whole of Transylvania in which at least one-third spoke Hungarian, and desired to remain a part of the Hungarian realm. The effect of these territorial changes has been to strip Hungary of more than half of her territory, while also crippling her economically by taking away nearly all her forest lands and much of her mineral wealth, and educationally by depriving her of two of her chief universities. These are grave injuries, for no suffi- cient explanation has ever been given to the world for these measures which seem impolitic as well as unjust. You are'doubtless aware that a thick veil of secrecy has, from the first, hung over the proceedings of the nego- tiating Powers, and though subsequent revelations, not always 'discreet, have given some light, much still re- mains matter for conjecture. It is a singular fact that though no diplomatic proceedings for three gener- ations have been so important as those of 1919-20, and though never before was there so general a demand for publicity, none have ever been kept so carefully shrouded in mystery. The Magyars, although obliged to submit for the moment, have not concealed their resolve to recover whenever they can the territories of which they hold themselves to have been unjustly deprived. They urge that though it may be true that they did in time past abuse their control to try to Magyarize the non- Magyar elements in the population of Hungary, such past errors furnish no reason for now subjecting 52 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS them to unfair treatment at the hand of those other races to whose rule they have been transferred. Though in this case, as in others, provisions have been placed in the treaties of peace for .securing the rights of minorities, it is more than doubtful whether such provisions will be observed, nor can we be sure that the newly founded League of Nations, commissioned to enforce them, will have the power to do so. 1 It is much to be feared that the Treaty of Trianon has prepared in Hungary a fruitful soil to receive the seeds of future war, and that no good relations can be expected between her and her two southern neighbor states, to which I now pass. The new kingdom called that of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, and known also as Yugo-Slavia (land of the South Slavs) consists of several Slav peoples now united into one kingdom under the king of Serbia. It includes several separate regions, viz., the Kingdom of Serbia, the provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina detached from Turkey in 1878, and annexed by Austria in 1909, the provinces of Croa- tia and Dalmatia, till recently parts of the Austro- Hungarian Monarchy, so much of the other Austrian provinces of Istria, Carniola and Carinthia as has not gone to Italy or been left to Austria, and finally the hitherto independent kingdom of Montenegro. The in- habitants of these areas all speak dialects of the South Slav language, the speeches of the peasant Croats and Serbs in the north differing from one another hardly more than the dialect of Northumberland differs from 1 The nations concerned are reputed to be already considering treaties for the protection in one another's territories of the numer- ous minorities now liable to be unfairly treated. One must hope that such arrangements may diminish the too numerous grounds of quarrel. THE GREAT WAR AND ITS RESULTS 53 that of Devon. The Slovene tongue is rather more distinct, but of the same linguistic family. Another line of division between the Yugo-Slav people separ- ates the Roman Catholic Croats and Slovenes from the adherents of the Orthodox Eastern Church in Serbia and Montenegro, not to speak of the many Muslims of Bosnia. The impulse of a common desire for inde- pendence and national unity has kept these differences from proving so serious as the foreign observer had ex- pected. But they are not to be ignored; and in any cace it will be no easy matter to build up a compact state in a population which though naturally gifted, has been little trained to self-government, is unstable in temper, and at a low level of education, except on the Dalmatian coast, where Italian culture is of old standing, and in one or two of the Croatian cities. The external relations of the South Slav state with Austria ought to be and may probably be friendly now, for the frontier questions between the countries have been settled. So they may be with Hungary also, if the claims of the two states to border territories in which Magyars and Serbs dwell intermingled can be adjusted. As regards Italy, the compromise effected by the Treaty of Rapallo has removed immediate risks of conflict, but the ambiguous position of Fiume and the annoyance felt by the Slavs at the assignment to Italy of some of the cities on the mainland of Dalmatia as well as some of the Adriatic islands, furnishes grounds for future dissension. Here, however, it must be admitted that Italy had a case, for two or three of these cities had been Italized while they were ruled by Venice, and the unprotected Adriatic shores of East- 54 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS ern Italy lying opposite the numerous deep inlets of the Dalmatian coast warranted Italian naval strate- gists.in requiring securities against a sudden attack by sea. There is, however, no present likelihood that Yugo-Slavia will be strong enough on land or on sea to pick a quarrel with Italy. She will have enough to do in organizing herself at home, and in trying to assimilate the diverse elements in her population. I come now to other sources of trouble that may arise between the South Slavs and their neighbors on the South and West. The Allied Powers prudently refused to divide Albania between Yugo-Slavia and Greece, leaving this interesting group of tribes, de- scendants of the ancient Illyrians whom Rome found it hard to tame, to work out their own salvation in their own way, hitherto a wild way, but likely to be softened now that the Turks are out of the way. The Skipetar tribes, as they call themselves, may con- tinue for a while to raid their neighbors and fight among themselves, but they are naturally gifted people, retaining some of the chivalric traditions of the Middle Ages, and with a patriotism which the need for de- fence against the larger peoples on their borders may keep alive. Travelling in Albania a good many years ago, I wished to cross a certain lonely region and when asked whether I could do so with a fair prospect of getting through, the answer was: "If you have a wife or sister with you, you will be safe. Otherwise your throat will be cut." On the East, Yugo-Slavia is confronted by Bulgaria, whose people, though they speak a Slavonic tongue which differs little from Serb and from Russian, are largely of Finnic slock. Descending from the middle THE GREAT WAR AND ITS RESULTS 55 course of the Volga in the eighth century A. D. they adopted the tongue of the Slavs whom they conquered and with whom they became commingled, but in physi- cal structure and in character they are sharply con- trasted with the Serbs, their bodies more solid, their in- tellect less imaginative and susceptible, a people of patient industry and steady will, good fighters and able to support defeat and rise from it with a resolve to re- cover what they have lost. A rivalry accentuated by the short wars of 1885 and 1913 has unfortunately created bad relations between them and the Serbs, and become one of the factors in preventing the formation of that Confederation of the Baltic peoples, to include Serbs, Greeks and Humans as well as Bulgarians which the friends of the races liberated from the Turkish tyranny dreamt of forty years ago. Bulgaria has at present few friends, for the Rumans have taken terri- tory inhabited by a Bulgarian population in the Dob- rudsha south of the lower Danube, the Greeks have re- ceived parts of Thrace where there is a large Bulgarian element, and have occupied the seaports on the north coast of the ^Egean Sea, and the Serbs have appropri- ated a large region in Southern Macedonia, where the Bulgarian element is (as I can say from knowledge acquired in travelling through these countries) in a large majority. This was one of the grievous errors committed by the Allied Powers assembled at Paris. Disregarding the appeal of the Macedonians to the principles of nationality and self-determination which would have made Southern Macedonia autono- mous or assigned it to Bulgaria, refusing to constitute in that region a small and more or less autonomous state under the protection of the Allied Powers, or of 66 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS the League of Nations, they left most of it to Serbia (which had conquered it from the Bulgarians in the war of 1913) and the rest to Greece. The Mace- donians have had to submit, but they have not re- nounced their aspirations; so one may fear trouble in this quarter as soon as a prospect of satisfying those aspirations rises over the horizon. With Greece a peaceful settlement seems more probable, and should Greek policy again be guided by the statesmanship of Venizelos or some one else imbued with his foresight, this may come about. The question of the Dobrudsha is more difficult, for the sentiments on both sides are more unfriendly, Rumania fearing the recuperative powers of Bulgaria, Bulgaria resenting Rumania's ac- tion, when, in the darkest moment of her own for- tunes, Rumanian 'troops were, although no state of war existed between the countries, sent in to occupy it. In referring to Rumania, it may be well to men- tion that she has another territorial issue to settle, viz., a controversy with Russia over part of Bessarabia, which the Rumans reasonably claim as inhabited by a population of their race and speech. This region the present Bolshevik government refuses to concede. Of Rumania's position towards Hungary, which will demand, if she sees a chance of success, the restora- tion of Magyar districts assigned by the Paris treaties to Rumania, I have already spoken. The general result of this survey of Southeastern Europe, which for many years, and especially since 1875, when an insurrection in Herzegovina sounded the first tocsin of danger, had been one of those parts of Europe in which the subterranean fires might at any moment threaten a volcanic eruption, is to THE GREAT WAR AND ITS RESULTS 57 show that these fires are as hot as ever. At present Bulgaria stands isolated, but her neighbors are united only by dislike and fear of her. No State is really friendly with any other. Political federation, or even such a Customs Union and Railway Union, as might help each of them to a better development of their re- spective resources, seems still remote. We may now turn northwards to the countries which formed part of the third and largest of the three great Empires. Of Russia itself, that is to say, of the vast region from the Gulf of Finland to the Sea of Japan which obeyed the Tsars in February, 1917, and which seemed when I travelled through it in 1913, to be loyal and attached to its rulers, I will not attempt to speak. I remember going to a religious service in the city of Tomsk in Siberia on the Name Day of the heir to the Russian throne. The whole official and uni- versity population of the town was gathered in the cathedral and the service went on for three hours, dur- ing which everybody had to stand, weariness relieved only by the beautiful music, and everybody seemed to be animated not only by piety but by a religious de- votion to the Tsar and the Romanoff dynasty. Less than five years from that date, at a town in the Ural Mountains on the confines of Siberia, the Tsar and his wife and his daughters and the innocent little heir for whom the people in Tomsk had prayed, were all bar- barously murdered, and not a voice of pity, not a voice of anger was raised anywhere within the Russian em- pire. You may say that the masses were terrified, but what had become of the loyalty? How easy it is to over-rate appearances! Everybody believed that the Tsar occupied a semi-divine position in Russia, and 68 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS that the empire of the Tsar was based, and solidly based, upon that feeling of religious devotion to his person. But all vanished and even the Russian Church was not able to avert it. Russia and Siberia have not yet received any Gov- ernment recognized de jure by the civilized Powers; and there is no regular peace between them and the neighboring lands to East and West. What has Fate in store for them? Predictions would be mere guesswork. If the experience of States which have in past times lapsed into anarchy or fallen under the dominion of a group of adventurers ruling by mere force, without a shred of constitutional or moral au- thority, were to furnish any ground for a forecast, we should expect the rise of some military despotism like that of Bonaparte. But whence or when will the De- liverer appear? Three attempts have been made by Denikin, by Koltchak, by Wrangel, and have failed. Some thoughtful Russians, now in exile, look not so much for an overthrow of the Bolshevik despotism as for a gradual transformation of it into an oligarchy with the element of Communist doctrine gradually reduced until it is ultimately eliminated as con- demned by experience. The leading figure in the rul- ing group has already confessed that Communism will not work in Russia. Whoever, be it an oligarchic group or a military chief, establishes order and some sort of regular and more or less legal government, will find a country from which its best intellects have been re- moved, some by starvation, many by murder, others by exile, so the task of reconstruction will be all the more difficult, more difficult by far than was that of Bonaparte when he overthrew the Directory in 1799. Leaving Great Russia and Siberia alone for the pres- THE GREAT WAR AND ITS RESULTS 59 ent (Siberia is still to be deemed a part of Russia and is ruled by the Republic of Soviets), we may con- sider the racial communities which, claiming each a nationality of its own, have tried to form themselves into States out of the ruins of the Tsarist dominion. Of these Finland had already not only a strong national feeling but a distinct language (or rather two lan- guages), Finnish and Swedish, quite unlike Russian. Having, moreover, possessed an autonomous constitu- tion, though one which the Russian Government had been seeking to destroy by constant encroachments, it was in a measure accustomed to self-government. Finland has now given itself a new and fairly well constructed constitution, and its republican govern- ment has worked normally for several years, since the suppression of the Communist agitation, which the Bolshevists had encouraged. Those who control the Republic of Soviets have, for the present, ceased to molest it. Esthonia is a small Finnish country which welcomed the opportunity of shaking itself clear of Slavonic and Bolshevized Russia, and has succeeded for three years in maintaining its independence. It has had few rela- tions with Sweden, nor has racial affinity led it to an alliance with Finland on the other side of the Gulf. Having no dynasty, nor any eminent personality fit to be turned into a king, it is now a republic struggling to produce republicans. The Letts, a small people, but intelligent and active, with the great commercial city of Riga for their capital, have set up a government in their country, which they call Latvia, and they were engaged when I last heard from a private correspondent there, in studying, with a view to imitation, the constitution of the United 60 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS States and in absorbing the writings of Walter Bagehot. So far, so good ; let us wish them all success. 1 The Lithuanians, once constituting an independent kingdom, thereafter united with Poland and ultimately swallowed up in Russia, are, like the rural Letts, a peasant people, but the sentiment of nationality which sprang up among the small educated class and had been much developed during the last half century, dis- posed them to welcome in 1917 the chance of inde- pendence; and they have been resisting the attempt made by the new Polish republic to absorb them on the ground that Lithuania was once part of a Polish kingdom. The prospects of Poland raise problems too large to be entered upon here. There are almost as many parties in Poland as there are politicians, and the com- plications of those parties, as well as of creeds and lan- guages, are so intricate and so shifting that few Western observers have been able to disentangle the threads. Poland is a country which has always engaged Ameri- can, French and British sympathies from the gallant fight it repeatedly made to recover its independence ever since that public crime, the partition of Poland, which was perpetrated by Frederick II of Prussia as the tempter of the more estimable Maria Theresa of Austria and as the accomplice of the more unscrupulous Catherine II of Russia. We all wish and hope that a Polish State will endure, but what form it will take and 1 A good deal of German culture has soaked in, so to speak, among the Letts, and the country is not too large for them to be able to know one another, and so find the persons who are best fitted to become leaders and administrators. In all countries that had pre- viously been governed by a foreign bureaucracy and had possessed no representative institutions, the discovery of men fit to administer is a serious initial difficulty. THE GREAT WAR AND ITS RESULTS 61 what territories it will include are questions still wrapt in darkness. The only one of its neighbors with whom its relations have been friendly is Hungary. Though nearly connected with the Czechs by religion (for the great bulk of the Poles are Roman Catholics) and by linguistic affinities, there was recently a sharp con- troversy between the peoples over the question of Teschen, but latterly prospects of a rapprochement have appeared. Towards the Germans feeling is much more bitter. The dispute over Upper Silesia which we have been watching during the last few weeks, saw the two countries virtually in arms against one another. The position of Danzig, a German city, and the so- called "corridor," giving Poland an access to the Baltic sea at that point, furnishes another cause for future disputes. The reciprocal animosity of Russians and Poles has been conspicuous for three centuries. Two years ago the Bolshevists attacked and tried to subdue Poland, which was saved largely by the sympathy of the French Government, who sent generals to advise the Polish military staff. Since the First Partition the French friendliness towards the Poles, which had fre- quently expressed itself on the occasions when they renewed their struggle for freedom, has been recently strengthened by the belief that an independent Poland would be a check upon Germany. The principle of nationality justified the Poles trying to recover from Prussia Posen, most of which is essentially Polish. But Lithuania and the other contiguous parts of the Empire of the Tsars are not to be placed in the same category. The Poles seem to be falling into the old and fatal error of mistaking increase of territory for increase of strength. To acquire subjects who must be held down 62 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS by force and to be obliged to provide troops and fortifi- cations for widely extended frontiers is a cause of weak- ness for any State which has not swiftly growing re- sources and an overflowing population needing new lands to cultivate. A Polish republic confined to lands inhabited by the Polish race would be more powerful than the vast realm of bygone centuries whose image floats before the eyes of Polish patriots to-day. In her own interest Poland would do better to forego the attempt to regain out of mere historic sentiment the boundaries of her ancient kingdom as it stood in the beginning of the eighteenth century. Lastly we come to what is called Ukrainia, the land of the Little Russians of Kiev as distinct from the Great Russians of Moscow. Let me say that the Ukrainians are the same people that we used to call the Little Russians, and of the same race as that which we have lately been hearing called Ruthenian. These are only different names for the same people, a race which inhabits Eastern Galicia, parts of Western Rus- sia, and parts of Northeastern Hungary. Whether these Little Russians or Ukrainians are really sufficiently distinct from the Great Russians of Moscow to be fit to be constituted into an independent kingdom may well be doubted. The agitation on be- half of a separate Ukrainian nationality would seem to be rather a factitious thing which has grown up among the very small educated class. The differ- ences of language and character between these two main subdivisions of the Russian stock (for I will not trouble you with the White Russians and Red Rus- sians) are greater than is that between the men of Northern and those of Southern France, but not as THE GREAT WAR AND ITS RESULTS 63 great as that between Swedes and Norwegians, or be- tween Spaniards and Portuguese. The Ukrainians or Ruthenes (of Western Russia) had been submissive and fairly contented subjects of the Tsars till there grew up among the professorial and literary class, some forty years ago, a nationalistic agitation, which in the end of the last century began to be secretly fostered by the Austrian government (probably at the instigation of the German Government) for its own political purposes, since it wished to draw this branch of the people towards its own Ruthenes in Eastern Galicia and Northeastern Hungary. The Bolsheviks seem to have stamped out for the time being these separatist aspirations, which may not have struck deep roots into the masses or to have now strength enough to keep alive an independent Ukrain- ian State, should any such be created. Between Ukrainia and Great Russia, as, indeed, between all the Baltic States I have been describing, there are no natural boundaries. The whole region from the Gulf of Finland to the Euxine is one vast open plain varied sometimes by lakes, sometimes by swamps. The courses of the rivers and rivers are scarcely ever to be deemed natural boundaries, since they unite rather than separate those who dwell on their opposite banks cannot be taken as any lines of demarcation between the races that occupy this great plain. The social and economic condition in which the new Baltic republics find themselves bears some resem- blance to that of the new Balkan States delivered within the last hundred years from Turkish rule. They are small, poor, and still imperfectly organized, while over against them will stand a huge and populous Russia, 64 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS again powerful whenever she receives a government capable of restoring a regular administration and de- veloping her immense resources. To protect themselves against aggression, and to improve their prospects of material growth, these new States ought to be united in a defensive confederation, and should resolve, if they can be induced to see their real interests, to set up no high tariffs to obstruct trade between them. The Baltic States, moreover, in case Russia should not herself enter into their federal system for they may fear her predominance if she did ought to offer to her the amplest facilities for the free use of their seaports. It must be remembered that Russia herself, once her internal troubles have subsided and she is again a military power will probably unless military arma- ments have been everywhere reduced endeavor to reconquer all the territories she has, for the mo- ment, lost, except, perhaps, Poland and Finland. The Russian exiles, survivors from the old regime who have escaped into Western Europe, make no secret of their desire to recover the Baltic lands, which had been largely Russified before 1917, and some of them long to reconquer even the territories beyond the Caucasus in which the native races had been only superficially affected by Tsarist rule. Such an attempt would raise a whole crop of new questions, capable of furnishing materials for new wars. Russia would be well advised to let the Caucasus be her southern boundary. Can any better boundary be imagined than a tremendous mountain range, some of whose summits reach eighteen thousand feet in height and with practically only one pass across it fit for wheeled vehicles? No better natural line of political THE GREAT WAR AND ITS RESULTS 65 demarcation could be found in the world and it would be a great deal better for Russia to recognize this fact rather than to try, out of mere patriotic sentiment, to recover Georgia, Armenia and the Tatar regions now called Azerbaijan. As respects Europe, a Russian monarchy of one hun- dred millions of people, with the immense wealth and growing population of Siberia thrown in, would be a menace to its neighbors. Before the war it was formidable enough to alarm Germany, and would have been more than a match for any European Power had not the administrative system, military and naval as well as civil, been worm-eaten by a corruption which prevailed up to the very highest circles. Here, how- ever, the future becomes too misty for our eyes to penetrate it. Many years may pass before the moral as well as material damage wrought during the last few years can be repaired. In our time, the strength of any State towards its neighbors depends at least as much upon its internal unity as upon its army and navy. It was the habit of obedience and a sort of worship of the Tsar as a superhuman being that held Russia together till 1917. That obedience gone, that spell of reverence broken, it may take long to re- store unity and order. From war-scourged Europe I turn to Western Asia, which has seen a more horrible if not a greater slaugh- ter than even that which Europe shuddered at during these last years. The Turkish Empire and the con- fusion which its fall and that of the Russian Tsar- dom have produced over the lands which lie between the JSgean Sea and the Caspian need a somewhat full explanation, because they have been less closely fol- 66 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS lowed in America than in Europe, and they illustrate the evils to which both Interventionist and Non-Inter- ventionist policies are exposed when civilized and semi- civilized States come into relations with one another. For more than two centuries in fact, ever since its weakness became evident and irremediable the Turk- ish Monarchy has been the danger spot of the Old World. When a State is both barbarous and decrepit, insurrection is the proper remedy. The misgoverned subjects of the Sultanate ought to have risen against it, destroyed it and created new States. This did not hap- pen, because the Muslims, much as they hated the evils of their own government, hated their Christian fellow- subjects more, and because the Turkish Government was able to borrow money by which it could purchase arms and repress insurrections by massacre; while the so-called Christian Powers were so jealous of one an- other that there were always some among them willing to support the Turk rather than permit his dominions to pass to any other among themselves. Thus, though the Sultan lost in succession Greece, Albania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Tripoli and Crete, he still retained parts of Europe and all his Asiatic dominions till Tur- key wantonly declared war against France and Eng- land in 1914. The war between the Allies and the Turks, in which the United States had not joined, though diplomatic relations with the Turks. had been broken off, was closed, or rather was supposed to have been closed, by the Treaty of Sevres, signed in 1920, the last of those negotiated at Paris, but not yet ratified. Its provi- sions, while most unwisely leaving the Sultan to reign in Constantinople, assured to the Allied Powers a THE GREAT WAR AND ITS RESULTS 67 means of control over the Bosphorus and the Darda- nelles, as being sea passages of incomparable impor- tance. Adrianople and a small land area north of Con- stantinople were given to the Turks, while the rest went to Greece to which were also allotted Smyrna and cer- tain districts along the eastern coast of the ^Egean, with the islands in that sea, except Rhodes and Cos. France received what is called a "sphere of commercial influ- ence" in Eastern, and Italy another such sphere in Western Asia Minor. The Turkish Government at Constantinople, overawed by the Allied fleets, would have accepted these provisions, but a body of rebel Turks in Asia Minor, composing the so-called Nation- alist party (the remnants of the infamous "Committee of Union and Progress," which declared war on France and England in 1914), and supported by a large force composed of ex-soldiers and irregulars, refused to sub- mit, and have rejected even those large concessions from the terms of the Treaty which the Powers offered to them at a recent conference in London. At this moment Greek and Turkish forces are fighting, both in Asia and Europe, for the districts which the Treaty of Sevres gave them, and the outcome is still doubtful. Of Syria and Eastern Cilicia, which France has ob- tained under a mandate from the Allied Powers and of Palestine, similarly assigned to England, I need not speak, for neither region constitutes a State capable of international relations. Armenia is, however, in a different position, for she is a State, though as yet only on paper. The interest which the people of the United States have taken in the fortunes of the hap- less Armenians for whom American missionaries have done so much during the last eighty years, an interest 68 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS further shown by the splendidly generous help which American charity has extended to the refugees since 1915, leads me to devote a few sentences to explain the present situation in that part of what was the Turkish Empire. Promises that the Armenians should be delivered from the yoke of their oppressors were made by France and England during the war, in which they had invited and received the aid of many Armenian volunteers, who fought bravely in both armies, and it was hoped that the United States might be induced to accept a "mandate" to supervise the administration of the country for a few years till it was able to stand alone. But when Turkey submitted after her defeat in the autumn of 1918, an armistice was hastily granted to her, which failed to provide for the immediate evacua- tion of the Armenian districts by the Turks, and the stipulations made for the disarmament of the Turkish armies were not enforced, so after some months the Turks, at first utterly disheartened, recovered their old arrogance, assuming the delays and negligence of the Allies to be due to indifference or timidity. The Turkish Nationalists in Asia, representing the Com- mittee of Union and Progress who had seized power in 1905 and carried Turkey into the war under German influence in 1914, assembled an armed force and have from their headquarters at Angora continued to defy both the Allies and the Sultan's Government, retain- ing Armenia in their military occupation, though the Treaty of Sevres provides for its constitution as an independent State to be added to that Armenian Re- public at Erivan of which I shall presently speak. Whether the Allies will succeed by diplomatic means THE GREAT WAR AND ITS RESULTS 69 in compelling the evacuation of the districts, parts of the Turkish Empire before the war, allotted to Ar- menia by the award made, at the request of the Allies, by President Wilson, remains to be seen. As some travelers have passed unfavorable criticisms upon the Armenian people, it is my duty to add that the strength of character of the race has been amply proved not only by the tenacity with which they have clung to their national traditions embodied in a copious ancient literature, but by the fact that both in 1895 and in 1915 tens of thousands of Armenian men and women who could have saved their lives by embracing Islam preferred to die as martyrs for their Christian faith. Why the Turkish Government, which had in 1915 massacred a million of its Christian subjects, women and children as well as men, under circumstances of brutality and cruelty unsurpassed in the history even of the blood-stained East why that government, which had treated the British prisoners whom it cap- tured in Mesopotamia with an inhumanity which caused the death of more than half of the private sol- diers the officers would probably have suffered equally but for the intervention on their behalf of German officers why after these crimes that Government should have been treated by the Allies with such ex- traordinary lenity and should now have fresh indul- gence offered to it by proposed modifications in the Treaty of Sevres these are mysteries the explanation whereof is probably known to some of you as it is to me. But the secret is one which, as Herodotus says of some of those tales which he heard from the priests in Egypt, is too sacred for me to mention. A few words more will complete what has to be 70 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS said of the plight in which Asia has been left by the war, to which the United States was not a party. When the Empire of the Tsars collapsed a year before the overthrow of the Sultans, the native races whom Rus- sia had ruled south of the Caucasus set up three inde- pendent republics. That of Azerbaijan a region (con- quered by Russia from Persia) on the Caspian was chiefly inhabited by Mohammedan Tatars. It has now been overrun and is controlled by the Bolsheviks. Georgia, on the Black Sea, inhabited by an ancient Christian race, whose king surrendered his dominions to Russia more than a century ago, was attacked on the one side by the Nationalist Turks, on the other by the Bolsheviks, and the latter now dominate it, al- though the Allied Powers recognized it a year ago. The third republic, with Erivan for its capital, was set up by the Armenians, after the Russian revolution of 1917, and a legislature was elected by Universal Suffrage in 1919. This republic also has now been overpow- ered by Bolshevik attacks from the East, coupled with Turkish attacks from the West, and is being ground to pieces between these two millstones, though some of the Armenians still hold out in the mountains. This Armenian State had been recognized by the Allied Powers and its representative signed the Treaty of Sevres, which contemplated the addition to it of the ter- ritory to be allotted to Armenia by President Wilson's award. The future of the Armenian nation, an intelli- gent, energetic and progressive race, who constitute the chief indeed almost the only civilizing influence in Western Asia, still hangs in the balance. From day to day we do not know what is going to happen and whether the promises made by the Powers to the Ar- THE GREAT WAR AND ITS RESULTS 71 menians will ever be redeemed. Among all the peoples that have suffered by the War, they have suffered most and been most cynically abandoned. The other remaining fragment of the Tsarist Em- pire (for I have already referred to Siberia) is Western Turkestan, where the Khanates of Khiva and Bokhara had been brought under Russian rule soon after the middle of last century. It has been the scene, since the break up of the Empire in 1917, of much fighting between native tribes and Bolshevik Russians or Bol- shevized natives, and authentic news of its condition seems almost unattainable. The Tatars are mostly fanatical Muslims, and the Russians few in number. Almost as uncertain are the prospects of Persia, a country long on the verge of anarchy, and the north- ern part of which was, when the war began, falling under Russian control. The brief career there of Mr. Morgan Schuster, whom President Taft selected to restore order to Persian finances, and whom the Rus- sians compelled the Shah to dismiss, is instructive, but I must not yield to the temptation to draw from it the morals it suggests. To complete this survey of the sorely plagued Old World a few words need to be said about the three Powers which in the Far East confront one another with no friendly mien. Bolshevik Russians stand armed along the Selenga and Amur rivers. The Japa- nese, who have been occupying Vladivostock, have armies facing the Bolsheviks, but apparently not at present engaged in fighting them. China has but a weak hold on Manchuria, its southern part being vir- tually controlled by Japan, which has influence hi Shan- tung also, through her command of the railway which 72 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS the Germans built. In China itself the present position is unstable, for some of the provinces are practically ruled by their governors, and those of the South do not recognize the authority of Peking. Japan annexed Korea in 1910 after her war with Russia, and has a firm grip on it, though a large section of the Koreans are dis- affected. Before 1914 the Russians had extorted from China considerable rights over Western Mongolia, and when I was in Siberia in 1913 people seemed to think that these rights would be turned into a protectorate stretching as far south as the Western Himalayas. Whether the Bolsheviks will resume the policy of en- croachment and how far the Chinese Government will resist them nobody seems to know. Meantime, the Mongols are protected by the weakness of their neigh- bors. There is plenty of inflammable material in Asia as well as in Europe, but at the moment there is less immediate danger to peace in Asia than we now see nearer home. The list I have given you of the dangers which now threaten the peace of the world is a long one, and some might have been added which want of tune obliges me to omit. Long as the list is, it seems to me a duty to present the facts as those in England who have given constant attention to the subject see them, for those facts are apparently not fully known to most Americans. The war and the so-called peace which has followed the war have left the Old World in a situation which Americans need to realize, since they also are affected by it. They cannot treat the economic and financial and political disasters which have befallen the great European countries as matters that can be regarded from a distance with THE GREAT WAR AND ITS RESULTS 73 calmness or with that complacency which the ancient poet attributes to the man who from the shore sees vessels laboring in the storm. You may rather feel, as another ancient poet observes, that nobody can be un- concerned when his neighbor's house is in a blaze. In the New World as well as in the Old, all men of good will are concerned to try to bring about a better peace by removing the dangers and injustices which bode future wars. It will tax all the wisdom and self-control of the Old World Powers to do this, and I doubt whether it can be done without the help of the New World. Do not suppose me to mean that a new European war is imminent. No country is in a position to re- sume fighting this year or next year or the year after. But history has taught us that fires allowed to smolder long are likely ultimately to break out, and it will be the part of wisdom to rake out the embers and quench them with all the water that can be found. I hope to indicate in a later lecture how this may be done, and shall then endeavor to show that it is the interest as well as the duty of all nations to join in a task which involves the future of mankind. LECTURE III THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THE relations of States to one another which we have been so far considering are primarily political relations, affecting the territories of States and the po- sition which each State holds towards its neighbors as an independent community desiring to maintain its position in the world. But there are other relations also, which it is convenient to deal with separately, be- cause they are influenced by motives of a material na- ture, estimable in money, and because they affect not merely the interests of a State as a whole, but also, and often more largely, those of particular groups or classes within a State, such groups or classes having private or class interests which may not be those of the whole State, though such groups or classes may not be strong enough to influence the general policy of the State and its attitude towards other States. These interests and the influences they can exert may be con- sidered under four heads those of Production, of Commerce, of Transportation, of Finance. They are too numerous and various to be dealt with in detail. All I can do here and now is to enumerate some of special consequence, illustrating their general influence by a few conspicuous examples. 74 THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE 75 Under the head of Production there will fall the de- sire of a State to acquire, either for itself as a State or for groups of its citizens, natural sources of wealth valuable for the purposes of producing wealth to be used by the citizens at home, or to be exchanged with the inhabitants of foreign countries by way of trade. Such desires may take the form of efforts to acquire the territory in which the natural sources of wealth exist, or to make arrangements with other States for obtain- ing the products of the latter on advantageous terms, possibly to the exclusion of, or disparagement of com- petition by other States. The kinds of natural wealth most coveted in earlier days were mines of the precious metals, gold and silver. Now, however, with the progress of science and the consequent development of manufacturing indus- tries, other minerals have become more important. Coal and iron come first, platinum and copper next. Copper was prized by savage peoples because, being more easily worked than iron, it was available for the making of weapons. It led Tshaka, the famous Zulu chief, to carry his murderous raids and conquests over large parts of Southeastern Africa and build up a sort of empire there a century ago. Its use for electrical in- dustries has latterly given it great importance. Nickel has acquired a special value because it is largely used in the making of plates for war vessels. Radium, the rarest of the metals, is also the most precious, and one can guess what would be the fate of any weak com- munity in which it might be discovered in abundance. Of the importance of coal we have had a striking instance in the provisions made by the Treaty of Versailles regarding the mines which exist in the 76 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Saar Valley, in the Teschen region and in Upper Silesia. The possession of rich coal fields may expose a State to the aggression of its neighbors, or may en- able it to make advantageous bargains with its neigh- bors by undertaking to supply fuel to them on favorable terms. It may be incidentally remarked that as coal, especially when found in conjunction with iron, 19 the basis of manufacturing industries, it creates a large wage-earning population, and that such a popu- lation, enjoying, especially under universal suffrage, important political power, may enter into industrial and political connections with a like wage-earning element in other countries. Such connections tend to create (as will be presently noted) a new set of rela- tions, unofficial, but possibly of international signifi- cance, between sections of peoples apart from their gov- ernments. Where a region inhabited by savage tribes or by a semi-civilized people is believed to be rich in any source of natural wealth, its possession is coveted by civilized States, and has often become a subject of strife between them. The history of tropical America since the days when Raleigh tried to capture for Eng- land the supposed gold resources of Guiana, and the history of Africa within the last half century, show how often jealousies and wars have arisen where the chief colonizing Powers, Spain, Holland, England, France and latterly Germany, Belgium and Italy also were concerned. Spitzbergen, almost the only part of the earth's surface which, because barren and unin- habited, had remained an unappropriated No Man's Land until the twentieth century, acquired value when coal-bearing strata, largely horizontal and therefore THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE 77 capable of being cheaply and easily worked, were dis- covered, so for some years before 1914 rights in it were the subject of negotiations between Russia, England, Norway, Sweden, Germany and even the United States, for an American group also asserted interests in some of the mining areas. These conflicting claims have now been settled by a recognition of Norwegian sover- eignty over the islands, Norway being that part of the European continent which lies nearest to them. A remarkable illustration of the greed shown by capitalistic groups in different countries to appro- priate natural resources has recently appeared in the case of the mineral oils. The invention first of the internal combustion engine, and thereafter of aircraft, suddenly extended the use and enhanced the value of these oils and threw an apple of contention among the great States. Some important oil fields, such as those of Mexico and those of Persia, lie in regions whose inhabitants have neither the skill nor the capital nor the security for life and property that are needed to enable the natives of the country to develop them, so the foreign capitalist jumps in, a syndicate is formed, and some State standing behind the capitalist syndi- cate tries to back it up, because the Government of the foreign State wants oil for the purposes of war. Hence many complaints, many misstatements and misunderstandings, many intrigues, many efforts by means not always above suspicion to obtain the lion's share of the spoil. Thus ill-feeling may be created be- tween States because groups of private citizens seeking their private gain, and inducing their Governments to press their claims, do not care how much international ill will they may provoke. 78 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS The interest every State has in turning to the fullest account its own productive power is, of course, height- ened when its industries are directed to the aim not merely of meeting the wants of its home market but to that of producing commodities to supply the needs of other countries. Thinly populated countries like Argentina and Brazil, which cannot consume all their own meat, coffee and sugar, as well as populous coun- tries like Belgium, Germany and England, which pro- duce more goods than their home consumption can absorb, have an interest in securing foreign markets for their products. This brings us to a second branch of the subject, the international relations which com- merce creates. Though the trading intercourse of States has always exerted a potent influence upon their politics, trade relations have become far more important within the last two centuries through the development of manu- factures and the cheapening and acceleration of trans- port facilities. "Aujourd'hui" to use words spoken seven years ago by M. Millerand, now President of the French Republic, "les interets economiques menent le monde." I need not therefore go back to the days when the Greeks settled themselves on the Hellespont and Bosphorus to profit by the corn trade from the maritime parts of Scythia, nor to the later days when Rome depended for food on the harvests of Egypt and North Africa, nor even to the early struggles of com- mercial Holland against Portugal and Spain. One case, however, deserves a word of mention, because it shows the power which a small number of sordidly selfish persons engaged in one particular line of business could exert upon the policy of great States, even when every THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE 79 consideration of humanity was, or ought to have been, arrayed against them. The Portuguese, the Dutch and the English shipowners during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries carried hundreds of thousands of miserable negroes from Africa to the two American continents; and the Governments of their respective countries set so much store by this traffic that the safe- guarding of it for their shipowners was repeatedly stipulated for in treaties. The planter who bought the slaves when landed in Brazil or Carolina might, at least, plead that he could not cultivate his estates without African labor and could get that labor in no other way, but the wealthy men who in Europe sup- plied the ships for this abominable traffic and the statesmen who regarded it as a means of enriching their respective countries, had no such excuse to allege. Strange that selfish greed and want of thought could make civilized men calling themselves Christians ob- tuse to considerations of morality, justice, and com- passion. It took twenty years from the time when Clarkson raised his voice against the Slave Trade in England down to the day when the British Parliament passed an act for its abolition ; and twenty years more were needed before it was forbidden by law to the sub- jects of all the other European countries, Portugal coming last of all. As men's needs and tastes increase with the prog- ress of cvilization, each country becomes more de- pendent on others, and as many commodities can be produced better or more cheaply in some countries than in others, the need for an exchange of products always grows. The desire of traders in each country to have the largest possible market for their exports, 80 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS and the parallel desire in each country to obtain raw materials or manufactured goods on the easiest terms, naturally lead both producers and consumers and all countries are both producers and consumers, because they must pay by their products for what they receive to be consumed to desire the maintenance of good re- lations with one another. Each profits by the exchange made with the other, and thus they work together for the common good. When a quarrel arises between two countries trading with one another, especially if it threatens war, the producers and the exporting merchants foresee a danger to their sales abroad, while consumers foresee a rise in prices or a difficulty in se- curing a due supply of whatever they have been wont to receive. Both producers and consumers have, there- fore, an interest in urging their respective governments to settle the dispute before it reaches the point at which the financial world takes alarm, stocks begin to fall, speculation in exchanges springs up. It would appear from these familiar facts that a powerful guarantee for peace is provided by international trade, so that the larger is the volume that trade attains, and the more numerous are the persons directly engaged in it, or whose welfare it affects, so much the less likely are States to seek in war a solution of their controversies. Many thinkers and statesmen have regarded this as the influence which would ultimately put an end to war by making every nation feel the losses to both the contending parties which war cannot but involve. It was this consideration that chiefly moved Richard Cobden to his advocacy of unrestricted trade. His was an enlightened mind, seeking not the advantage THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE 81 of his own country in particular, but thinking of man- kind as a whole. Here, however, another influence intervenes. There are in every country persons who produce commod- ities, be they food or raw materials or manufactured goods, similar to those which, coming from foreign countries, are imported and offered for sale to their fellow-citizens hi competition with the commodities which they themselves have to sell. If these imported commodities are offered at lower prices than the prices at which the home producer can afford to sell them in his home market so as to yield a profit, they are, if of equal quality, likely to be bought in preference to the same commodities produced at home. The home pro- ducer, therefore, either loses part of the sale he would otherwise have obtained, or is obliged to lower his prices to meet the competition of the commodities coming from abroad. He complains of this as unfair, and de- mands that the unfairness should be rectified by the im- position of an import duty on the foreign products which will give his own commodities an advantage in the home market. He argues that if his fellow-citizens, the home consumers, are so lacking hi a sense of civic brotherhood, and in the patriotism which desires that all profits should be kept at home and no part go to the foreigner, such selfishness ought to be cured by law, that is, by a law placing on imports duties sufficiently high to reduce, or exclude, foreign competition. This claim made by the home producer has in most countries been listened to. It began with the em- ployers of labor who desired a tariff to ward off the competition of foreign goods, but it was also taken up 82 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS by agriculturists, who wished to see their grain or fruits similarly defended. Latterly, it has, in some countries, been reinforced by the support of the hand- workers. In Australia and New Zealand, for instance, the wage-earning class has been steadily pressing for an increase of import duties. Those colonies had in their early days found it so inconvenient to raise reve- nue for the service of the State by direct taxation, that pretty high duties were imposed upon wares im- ported from abroad. This led to the creation of manu- facturing industries hi countries where such industries were really exotics, because manufactured goods were being produced so much more cheaply in Europe that they could, even after paying the cost of a long ocean transport, have been sold in Australia at a lower price than similar goods produced there. Now, the work- men in Australia have been constantly pressing that their wages should be raised. When the courts of law which fix wages awarded, as they usually did, a rise, the manufacturers insisted that they could make no profit on their business unless the tariff on imports was also so raised as to enable them to sell their goods at a higher price than would be possible under foreign competition. This claim was allowed, and the tariff further raised. The process went on steadily; as wages rose higher and higher, the tariff was also raised in order that the employers should be enabled to pay the rising wages. The wage earners are, accordingly, now fully persuaded that their interests require very high duties to secure constant employment, and to secure it at a high rate of pay. Were the employers only interested, the high duties might possibly disappear, to be re- placed by a tariff for revenue only, for this would, of THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE 83 course, benefit the wage-earner regarded as a con- sumer, but the latter thinks of himself chiefly as a producer and prefers high wages to cheaper commodi- ties. How far this happens elsewhere, I cannot say. It certainly happens in Australasia. I am here neither defending nor condemning any particular fiscal policy, but am concerned only to in- dicate the effect which high tariffs have upon interna- tional relations. These effects are twofold. In the first place, they have furnished many occasions for disputes between States. Every State that has an interest in getting the largest possible market for its products, desires to induce, or (if it has the power) to compel every other State to admit those products to its market, either free of duty or at a tariff low enough to enable them to be largely sold, while most States desire to keep their tariffs high enough to give a sub- stantial advantage to their own producers. Hence the scale of duties on imports has become a constant sub- ject of negotiations between States. When governments succeed in reaching those ar- rangements which are called Commercial Treaties, by which reciprocal abatements of import duties are con- ceded so that the producers in each country are able to count on a considerable sale in the market of the other, there is a prospect that trade between them may be- come brisk, and as the peoples get to know one another, their common advantage may induce friendliness. These treaties are usually made on the Bismarckian basis of Do ut des; I give you something to get some- thing from you. It is a "deal" wherein each nation makes some concession from its normal tariff. An il- lustrative instance occurs to me in the case of a treaty 84 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS which I had long ago to negotiate with Spain. By it Great Britain lowered her duties on certain Spanish wines in return for a lowering by Spain of her duties on certain British textile goods. I remember taking the treaty to Mr. Gladstone, who was then Prune Min- ister, and asking him whether he had any objection. He "hummed and hawed" and looked a little askance at it, but said at last that though he saw in it a slight deviation from sound fiscal principles, he would not object to it if the Foreign Office desired it, and so it was ratified. It did not, however, last very long. As usually happens in such cases, the Spanish textile manufacturers went to their Government and said that they were displeased at seeing the duty on British tex- tiles lowered, and would rather go back to the higher tariff. The Spanish Government assented, for the manufacturers could influence votes, and the treaty was after a while allowed to expire. That sort of thing frequently happens. The famous commercial treaty which Cobden negotiated with Louis Napoleon, in 1860, was made for a term of years, and then, at the instance of French industrials, was not renewed. The policy of France has latterly been to make her commercial agreements for much shorter peri- ods than was the practice of Germany. In every coun- try objections are likely to be raised by interested sec- tions and when the working of such a treaty has created discontent in either, or both, of the contracting coun- tries, each Government tries to coerce the other into giving it more favorable terms. Then ensues what is called a Tariff War, in which each State raises its tariffs higher and higher in the hope of "bluffing" the other into compliance with its own demand. There was some THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE 85 time ago such a conflict between Italy and France, and another (some time before the Great War) between Russia and Germany, in which in both countries, pro- ducers as well as consumers, suffered, and the com- promise to which the contending States were ulti- mately driven did not allay the irritation which strife had created. The obstacles to trade offered by custom houses have sometimes brought about a commercial union of inde- pendent States for the purposes of the duties to be imposed on the import or export of goods. This hap- pened when the thirteen States of the North Ameri- can Confederation united in the National Government set up by the National Constitution of 1788-89. A later case was the formation of a Zollverein (literally, Tolls Union) in 1828-34 by the several kingdoms and principalities, except Austria, which constituted the then existing Germanic Confederation, a case remark- able, because it helped to lead forward to the union of all those States in the German Empire, established in 1871. This Union still subsists, though now under a republican form, hi the German realm of to-day, which continues to have a certain federal character. An opposite phenomenon is seen in the case of six countries, each of which, though all of the six are legally parts of the same monarchy and have a com- mon foreign policy, has, nevertheless, come to possess its own system of customs dues. In that union of self- governing commonwealths, which is popularly called the British Empire, Great Britain and all the five British self-governing dominions (Canada, New- foundland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa) have each one its own tariff, enacted by its own legis- 86 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS lature. No two have the same tariff. You will doubt- less remember that in 1911, a commercial treaty (sub- sequently disapproved by the Canadian Parliament) was negotiated between the United States and the Do- minion of Canada without the interference of Great Britain. When some years ago a group of British poli- ticians were advocating the formation of a uniform tariff for all the territories of the British Crown they were soon forced to drop the project, because it became clear that each Dominion wished to have its own tariff, even when that tariff bore hard upon articles exported from Great Britain. Each was willing to give the mother country some preference in its market, but would not consent to admit her products free of duty, or to adopt the British scale of import duties, for the manufacturers in the several Dominions, and the work- men they employed, feared the competition of British producers. One class of cases needs mention in which special reasons may induce States to set up, for reasons other than commercial, tariffs taking certain articles out of the category of those which can be dealt with on the principles usually applicable to commercial relations. When any country is so far behind in the arts of indus- trial production that its workshops cannot produce articles needed for the purposes of war, such as heavy guns or armor-plated ships, at a profit to the producer, such a nation may feel itself obliged to provide for a supply of these articles in war time by placing upon ironwares and certain other substances used hi war, duties sufficiently high to make it profitable to produce them at home. Such conditions take the case out of the operation of normal economic principles. Russia was THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE 87 long in this position. She could not, owing to the back- wardness of her industries and her geographical posi- tion, afford to depend upon other countries for articles essential to her military safety, so she maintained a high tariff on those articles, and foreign firms established factories in her territory. It may, however, be main- tained that she would have done better to grant a sub- vention or bounty to the home manufacturers rather than encourage them by a tariff, for a tariff makes the goods to which it applies dearer to all purchasers, and in so doing sometimes hampers other industries by rais- ing the price of articles which they need for their own manufacturing production. In this instance, so far from free trade killing war, it was war, or rather the fear of war, that was killing free trade. There is visible in Australia, and, indeed, in some other countries, a sentiment, assuming the guise of patriotic self-reliance, that the country should be self-sufficing, able to provide herself with everything she needs which climatic con- ditions do not absolutely forbid her to produce, even if in so doing she incurs heavy economic loss. This is a strange and futile resistance to those laws of geography and natural development which have given special op- portunities to particular regions and peoples. Why grow bananas under glass in Norway if you can import them from Jamaica? Which of us would think of learning to do something badly which others can do better for us, be it playing the fiddle, or painting, or conducting a lawsuit, or mending a motor car? If you ask what has proved in fact to be the influ- ence of commercial considerations in preserving peace by making each nation unwilling to quarrel with those to whom it profitably sells and from whom it profitably 88 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS buys, two recent instances may be cited to throw light on the question instances which show how these con- siderations, on which Cobden and other eminent men who followed him have set high value, failed to have their expected effect. Russia was before 1914 one of the best markets which her great neighbor, Germany, had for manu- factured goods, and was also one of the most promis- ing fields for the employment of German capital in industrial enterprises. The prosperity and purchasing power of Russia were growing fast, so German manu- facturers had a cogent motive for desiring Russia's prosperity and for extending the very profitable trade they were driving wih her. Nevertheless, this mo- tive did not prevent the German Government from go- ing to war with Russia in 1914, a step contemplated as probable for some time previously, as was shown by the newspaper campaigns which the German and the Rus- sian newspapers carried on against one another. The action of Germany may have been due partly to a fear of Russia's material growth, which made her think it best to strike at once, partly to the confident belief that Russia, even though leagued with France, could be easily overthrown and brought into a commercial subservience which would enable German traders to dominate Russia and hold it as their exclusive pre- serve. Be this as it may, considerations of imme- diate economic loss counted for little or nothing. Even the leading German manufacturers and financiers did not try to prevent war. The other case is still more instructive. For many years before 1914 the growing commercial prosperity of Germany had made for the expansion of the trade THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE 89 between her and England. Among all foreign coun- tries she was England's largest customer, and both countries were profiting immensely by this trade. Though they competed hi some kinds of goods, they were in other kinds complementary to one an- other, for English manufacturers bought from Ger- many many partly manufactured articles and after finishing them exported them to Germany as well as elsewhither. Despite the check on imports which the high German tariff imposed, the German market was extremely valuable to England, and the English mar- ket no less valuable to Germany. On the other hand, there had begun to exist in English manufacturing and mercantile circles a certain jealousy of the rapid ex- tension of German trade, whi^h was supplanting that of England in certain markets, such as those of Spanish America, the importance of which British exporters had been the first to discover. This German advance was sometimes attributed to the active support which the German Government gave to its own subjects, but it was due much more to the assiduity of German busi- ness firms and their agents in studying the require- ments of the foreign customer, and to the tireless dili- gence of their agents on the spot in mastering the languages spoken in the countries where they were employed and in pushing their goods by every means available. British travellers admitted, and could not but admire, the energy which the Germans threw into their work. This vexation at the success of their com- petitors sometimes found expression in the British press, and any such expressions were exaggerated in the German press, for there are everywhere some newspapers willing to make mischief. Yet the jealousy 90 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS aforesaid did not really chill the relations of the two peoples, for it was checked by the English sense of fair play, which recognized that hard work deserved suc- cess, and it certainly did not affect the official policy of England towards Germany, which continued to be friendly till the extension of the German navy raised apprehensions of a different nature. The many English friends of Germany, who did their best for the maintenance of peace and good-will between the nations and especially those of us who knew Germany, who had lived in Germany or had in days of youth studied in German universities, together with those who loved German literature and German music all these refused to believe that Germany could be seriously hostile to England, and also regarded the common interest that both countries had in their great and growing trade as being a valuable asset for the preservation of peace. But these cool-headed Germans had to contend in their own country against the feeling that it was unfair that so great a mercantile State as Germany had become should have possessions abroad less extensive and less worth having for busi- ness purposes than were the dominions of Britain or of France. That she had not possessions so valuable was of course due to the fact that Holland, France and Britain had begun to be exploring and colonizing Pow- ers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when there was virtually no German State, but only, under the semblance of an Empire, a congeries of petty, al- most independent, monarchies, none of them occupied with enterprise by sea. Had the Netherlands been po- litically a part of a united Germany in those two later centuries, as they were in the eleventh and twelfth THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE 91 centuries, the course of history would have been en- tirely different, and half of the tropical world might have been German. However, as I have said, many persons in England, and some in Germany, believed that the reciprocal benefits which the two countries drew from their trade constituted, if not a security, yet a strong force making for peace. We in England were mistaken. See what happened hi 1914! When the decisive moment came at which the Ger- man Government had to decide whether it would by entering Belgium bring England into the war that was already breaking out against Russia and France, and when the British Government and Parliament had to decide whether they would enter the war as the oppo- nents of Germany, all these material considerations, all thought of the economic advantages which each country derived from peaceful commercial intercourse, vanished like a morning mist in the presence of those other motives which drove the nations into war, Ger- many, it would seem, confidently, England regretfully. As a dam gives way when a waterspout has filled the valley above it with a raging torrent, so that founda- tion of common material interests which counseled both to keep the peace, proved fatally insecure. Politi- cal reasons overcame all others. Among these reasons there was, probably, in the minds of many Germans the belief that a successful war would make Germany supreme hi industry and trade as well as in the arts of war, and enrich her with the colonial possessions she desired. Nevertheless, there was one famous captain of commerce, Herr Ballin, the head of the greatest shipping enterprise hi the world, the Hamburg- Ameri- 92 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS can Company, who, when he perceived that the coun- sels of peace had not prevailed, saw the approaching ruin of the vast business his energy had built up, and, like Ahithophel in the Book of Samuel when his wise counsel was not followed, put an end in despair to his own life. Such incidents move us all, even in the midst of a world catastrophe. As Virgil says: "Sunt lacrymce rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt" A third set of questions that brings nations into relations affecting their commercial intercourse are those belonging to trade routes and the transport of goods along them. First, of sea routes. Every nation desires above all things free access to that highroad to everywhere, which the oldest of poets called thirty centuries ago the Wide-Wayed Sea. Russia is the only great State that has found this access through her northern ports closed during the winter by ice, and through her southern ports on the Black Sea liable to be at any time closed by the Power which holds the shores of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. She haa long sought a warm water harbor on the Atlantic, and thought of buying one from Norway. She had, before the war, got a sort of haven on the Arctic coast west of the mouth of the White Sea, but eastwards thence along the Siberian and Kamchatkan coasts there was none nearer than Vladivostock on the Sea of Japan, unsurpassed as a naval station, for the long channel of approach is eminently defensible and capable of being kept open throughout winter by an ice breaker. The desire for this warm water port had much to do with Russia's eastward march down the Amur river; and the desire for uncontrolled access to the Mediterranean was a strong motive for seeking to possess Constant!- THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE 93 nople, that mistress of two seas whose position as the meeting point of Europe and Asia has given it a unique international importance. The passages of the Sound and the Greater and Lesser Belts which connect the Baltic with the Cattegat and North Sea, as also the isthmuses which are now traversed by the canals of Suez and Panama, have, as everybody knows, given rise to controversies and negotiations between mari- time powers. The claims which certain nations advanced to wide stretches of sea, culminating in Spain's assertion of a right to the whole of the Pacific Ocean and Portugal's assertion of a right to the Atlantic south of Morocco, as well as to the whole of the Indian Ocean, have long been obsolete, and it is hard to know what is meant by the phrase, "Freedom of the Seas," which has been frequently bandied about during the last few years, but never authoritatively explained, still less defined. As the seas have long been perfectly and equally free to all vessels in peace time, the phrase must appar- ently be taken to refer to the seas when they become a theater of war, on which fleets contend as armies fight on land, and on which warships destroy warships, and capture their enemies, as enemy forces are de- stroyed by infantry, cavalry and artillery. But what do the words mean as applied to the operations of naval war? What sort of "freedom" is desired on sea? Does the term mean that no nation is to be allowed to possess a navy of preeminent strength, or does it refer to the much debated right of warships to capture the trading ships of an enemy and the vessels and goods belonging to neutrals, and the goods of an enemy car- ried in neutral ships? (I pass by the right of blockad- 94 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS ing enemy ports and the questions relating to contra- band, for these are different matters.) There is much to be said, on both sides, about these rights of capture, but they do not seem to have been raised in the nego- tiations that have followed the war, and they need not be discussed here, though they will doubtless be dis- cussed hereafter. There have been many controversies between States over the use for navigation of rivers dividing two States, or descending from one State into another, and treaties often contain provisions regulating the respec- tive rights of riparian States. A good example is fur- nished by the Danube, the lower navigation of which was placed by the Treaty of Paris in 1856 under the control of an International Commission, on which the States interested were represented and which worked efficiently. Some great streams are, like the Amazonas, entirely open, Brazil having very properly recognized the rights of Peru and Ecuador to have free access to the Atlantic. The recent Treaty of Versailles has dealt with the Vistula and the Oder and the Elbe and the Rhine; and Switzerland, which was not a party to that treaty, has raised points affecting her rights on the last named river. The control of the lower part of the Scheldt was a subject of constant contention between Holland, which held (and still holds) both banks, and the Power to which Antwerp belonged, so that the Emperor Joseph II said that if the Dutch would allow his ships to pass freely through from that city to India he would drop all the other grievances against the United Provinces whereof he complained. Water serves other purposes besides navigation. It THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE 96 is inhabited by fish. Flowing water is not only a source of mechanical power, but can be em- ployed for irrigation. No controversies have given more trouble than those raised over fishing rights. Those recognized by the Treaty of 1783 as existing on the coasts of Newfoundland and Canada were a bone of contention between the American and British Govern- ments from 1783 to 1910, when they were finally settled by arbitration a remarkable arbitration, because it is, so far as I know, the only, or almost the only, case in history where both parties were perfectly well satisfied. A useful illustration both of the intricate questions which arise when rivers are concerned, and of the best way of settling such questions, may be found in the pe- culiar and instructive case of two streams, whose course lies partly in the Northwestern United States and partly in Western Canada, viz., the St. Mary's River and the Milk River. These two streams, the courses of which pass backwards and forwards from the United States into Canada and from Canada into the United States, are serviceable to both countries, partly for irrigation, partly for navigation, and each country could inflict inconvenience on the inhabitants of the other by asserting rights of ownership within its own territory without regard to the interests of the neigh- bor country. To prevent any such unneighborly ac- tion, and to provide for the best use of the waters for the benefit of both countries, a treaty was drafted in 1908, and finally approved in 1910, which outlined an arrangement meant to secure that common beneficial use, by "pooling" the waters of both, treating them as one common stream to be used equally for the pur- 96 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS poses of the two countries. 1 The carrying out of the scheme was entrusted to an International Commission composed of delegates from both the United States and Canada, with very wide powers of adjusting both water questions and other matters which might from time to time affect the economic relations of the two peoples. This Commission has worked well and has shown itself capable of settling controversial questions that might have given rise to ill feeling had each nation stood stiffly upon its legal rights, especially as it would (in most instances) have been hard to say what the legal rights were. The open sea is open to all, but though its shores are normally under the sole control of the State to which they belong, still inasmuch as some use of the coasts is practically indispensable to those who catch the fish in the adjoining waters, questions are apt to arise between the local fishermen and those who come from other countries, and the adjustment of these questions may become difficult, even when provisions regarding them have been inserted in treaties. As re- gards Newfoundland the respective treaty rights of the native and of the American fisherman had repeat- edly led to friction, which lasted till the arbitration of 1912. France also attached high importance to the rights hi the cod fisheries which her fishermen enjoyed under old treaties, because the fishing vessels which came to the Banks of Newfoundland every spring in 1 It is a pleasure in this connection to pay a tribute to the wisdom, tact and diplomatic skill of Mr. Elihu Root, with whom the earlier negotiations that led to the settlement of the terms of that treaty were conducted, and also to the judgment and fairness of Mr. Robert Bacon, who succeeded Mr. Root as Secretary of State and in whom America has lost, during the war, one of its most high-minded statesmen. THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE 97 large numbers from Brittany and Normandy furnished the reservoir from which the French navy drew its supply of hardy mariners. 1 Another instance of a different kind will illustrate the many points that may arise where the subjects of several nations pursue their occupations in the same sea area. There was forty years ago a pernicious traf- fic in ardent spirits carried on in the North Sea by small ships which sold these drinks to the fishing boats, demoralizing their crews and increasing the dangers that belong to a stormy sea. The British Government, anxious for the welfare of its fisher folk, tried to bring about an agreement between the several States whose fishermen frequented these waters, and asked them to join in enacting a sort of police code to be enforced upon what you would call in America the "floating saloons" that did the mischief. France, Holland, Den- mark, Belgium and Norway agreed, but the German Government held out, not from any objection to tem- perance in general, but at the instance, as we were told, of a small group of distillers and liquor dealers in a few North German ports, who made large gains out of selling their poisonous stuff to the fishermen. Happening to hear that Bismarck had been asking for certain facilities for German steamers in the harbor of Hong Kong, which our colonial authorities had been refusing, I communicated, having then charge of the matter, with our Colonial authorities at Hong Kong, explaining the point to them. They consented to grant the facilities, and we then told Bismarck that if Ger- many would join in our proposed restrictions of the 1 One of the questions which arose between Britain and France was whether lobsters are included under the word "fish." 98 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS North Sea liquor trade, her steamers might have the berths they desired in the harbor of Hong Kong. This "deal" appealed to the business sense of the great Chancellor, who was never above small gains. The German steamers got what they wanted at Hong Kong, and the wished-for police rules were established for the North Sea under the authority of all the Powers con- cerned. Stepping from water to dry land, I may remind you that trunk lines of railroad serving the various countries they traverse affect economic as well as strategic interests. Railways seek not only the short- est routes and the most populous centers of industry, but are often determined in their course by the physi- cal contour of the country. Where they are obliged to traverse a mountain range they must do so at the low- est possible level, and with the fewest possible tunnels and rock cuttings. No railway crosses the Pyrenees, but five have since 1867 been made across the mam chain of the Alps. (There are indeed six, if one counts the Semmering and Karst line from Vienna to Triest.) Two of these (Gothard and Simplon) pass through Switzerland, and there was much negotiation between the four great States whose traffic was affected, while efforts were made by governments, and by the citizens of the countries concerned, to secure shares hi the com- panies that built the lines. The neutrality of the Swiss Confederation has become more important than ever from the military consequence these lines would have could belligerents use them. It is of enormous benefit to Europe that the great Transalpine railroads pass through a neutral country, and a neutral country that THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE 99 showed in the recent war that she had the courage to defend her neutrality. There is also another way in which railroads have come into politics. Concessions to construct them are often sought by rival groups of capitalists in different countries, and Governments do their best to secure the concession for the group they favor. Much political pressure, as well as other inducements, were applied to China by several foreign Powers, and some of these Powers made bargains among themselves by which their respective claims to a share were appeased. Some- thing similar had happened in Turkey, where at last the great prize, the concession of an extension of the Anatolian railways across the Taurus range and the Amanus to Aleppo, Carchemish, Mosul and Bagdad was secured by Germany. The apprehensions of Rus- sia and England delayed the completion of the under- taking for some years, but their opposition was finally dropped in 1914, just before the war, 1 and the tunnels through the two mountain ranges were finished during the war, but too late to make much difference to mili- tary operations. The line was taken out of German control by the Treaty of Versailles. The recent con- struction of a railway across the Desert of Suez and Sinai, which links up Egypt to the lines running from the Mediterranean coast northwards to Damascus, Horns and Aleppo, and the long Mecca Pilgrims line constructed by Sultan Abdul Hamid from Damascus to Medina, may have no small influence on the politics as 1 Surprise has often been expressed that the advantage conceded to Germany obtained by the withdrawal of opposition to the Bagdad railway and by the very large territories yielded to her in Africa did not operate to dissuade her from entering on war at that moment. 100 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS well as the trade of all these regions. These railways made possible the existence of such a thing as the new Arab kingdom of the Hedjaz, for without it the diffi- culty of reaching Eastern Syria from Mecca would be very great. This brings us to a fourth branch of the subject, the influence of International Finance upon diplomacy. European States may be classified as the Lending Countries, France, England, Holland and Belgium, and the Borrowing Countries, the chief among which have been Russia, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Turkey. Germany has, on the whole, followed the principle of Polonius, "Neither a borrower nor a lender be." She used to spend nearly all her disposable capital either at home or in her Colonial dominions, but some was invested in Italy, and the influence it gave her there was actively, though, as it turned out, unsuccessfully, exerted to induce Italy to remain neutral in the late war. To-day almost the only country that has capital to invest is the United States, and the impoverishment of the States that were recently belligerents gives Amer- ican financial interests an influence almost without precedent in history, the exercise of which may make a great difference to the welfare of the Old World. That capital, superabundant in one country, should be lent to another which needs it for the execution of public works, such as railway building, or for the de- velopment of natural resources, such as mines, or for providing plant to work large-scale industries this is natural and legitimate. English capital went in this way at one time to America and afterwards to Argen- tina, and no political harm followed. American capital would go now to Siberia, if Siberia were delivered from Bolshevik rule, and it would give an enormous lift to THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE 101 that vast country. But there are cases in which the results of the process have been unfortunate. The making to Turkey of loans which were in some cases guaranteed by the governments of West European countries gave the lenders in those countries a regret- table interest in the maintenance of a detestable tyr- anny, and the bulk of the money which the Turks ob- tained was spent upon ships and guns to be used to pro- long that tyranny, while the rest was either wasted or appropriated by Turkish Ministers. Similarly the im- mense sums borrowed by that profligate rascal, Ismail, formerly Khedive of Egypt, from West European finan- ciers were consumed in a luxury which did not benefit the country. When its revenues could no longer pay the interest on these loans, the bondholders pressed their governments to intervene. The Western Govern- ments, acting for their own and the other creditors, got the Sultan to depose Ismail, and set up what was called a Dual Financial Control, which ultimately led to a British Protectorate, and so to the severance of Egypt from Turkey, with a consequent benefit to the Egyp- tian masses. Upon the present situation in some of the Caribbean Republics, bristling with problems still unsolved, I need not dwell, for you are more familiar than I can claim to be with the events which have led to the as- sumption by the United States of a certain slight meas- ure of financial influence in Central America, as well as a control of the finances of San Domingo and Haiti. The mention of Latin American countries suggests a class of cases in which, as in Turkey, loans have in- truded themselves into politics. The dictators of some of the Republics, calling themselves Presidents, have been wont to borrow large sums in Europe, to spend LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIF< 102 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS part of such sums on paying the troops by which they kept power, and to invest the balance in France, so that when they were threatened with dethronement or tired of their unquiet life, they retired to Paris, there to spend their ill-gotten gains. Guzman Blanco of Venezuela, whom London as well as Paris used to see in the heyday of his fortunes, was an instance, and not the worst, for he was less bloodthirsty than some of his fellows. When the interest on these loans ceased to be paid, the European bondholding creditors pressed their Governments to compel payment by the dictators or their successors, which the latter were unwilling, as well as usually unable, to do, and political complica- tions naturally followed. You remember the case of Venezuela in 1903, which may prove to have been the last, for it is now generally felt that those who lend their money to an improvident or unscrupulous gov- ernment, knowing the risks, and getting high interest because the risk is great, are not entitled to ask the aid of their own governments to save them from loss in a speculation which has turned out ill. The case of the French loans to Russia shows an- other form in which financial motives can affect poli- tics. When France, after the war scare of 1875, found herself alone in the world and exposed to possible attack from a more numerous and more strongly armed neighbor nation, she began to look abroad for allies, and after a tune found one. As the Russian Govern- ment desired to obtain loans of money, the political interests of France made its Government indicate its good will towards Russia as a borrower, and French in- vestors responded, so Russia succeeded in borrow- ing from them very large sums, estimated at about five THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE 103 billions of dollars in all, and that not only from the great but from small capitalists also. This gave the French creditors a concern in the welfare of Russia which drew close the relations between the two coun- tries. The revolution in Russia reduced the value of her bonds and stopped the payment of interest on them, for it led, after eight months, to the installation in power of the Bolshevik Communists, who declared themselves hostile to and sought by their propaganda to overthrow all so-called "bourgeois" Governments. But the French have not lost the hope that there may yet be established in Russia some Government which will recognize and fulfill the obligations incurred by its Tsarist predecessor, and there are Russian exiles well entitled to speak who share that hope. There is another form besides loans to Governments in which financiers acquire interests in foreign coun- tries, by obtaining from the governments of the latter grants of natural sources of wealth, or concessions for the construction of railways or harbors, or for the building of warships. As these contracts often promise large profits they are eagerly sought for, and the Gov- ernment of the State to which the would-be contractor belongs is besought to press his offer and to declare that the acceptance of it will be taken as a mark of political friendliness. In certain countries persuasion is accom- panied by material inducements intended to secure the favor of the Minister who has the contract to dispose of. Sometimes when a foreign Government lends money or influences its subjects to lend it, this is done on the condition that lucrative orders are given to the sub- jects of the lending State. In such countries as Turkey and Persia, nothing could be obtained without bribery, 104 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS and the briber recouped himself by contriving to squeeze out of the contract a good deal more than the stipulated payments. When, as often happened, dis- putes arose over the fulfillment of a contract, the con- tractor's Government was expected to take up his case. It was no small part of the work of many an Embassy or Legation, and indeed the most tedious and disagree- able part, to argue these cases, and to resist the at- tempts which some Governments, such as those of the less reputable among Spanish American Republics, made to confiscate the existing rights of one foreign firm in order to have something to sell to another for- eigner. These squabbles did not often lead to a suspen- sion of diplomatic relations, but they caused irritation, and tended to prevent the best kind of foreign firms from dealing with the countries where trouble was to be expected. To what extent ought Governments to mix policy with business, and become, as it has been said, "drum- ming agents" or commercial travelers, for their citizens? Some countries have gone far in this direction. Ger- many and Belgium used to be quoted as examples, whereas the Governments of France and England were complained of by eager promoters of enterprises as not going far enough. The English Foreign Office was (in the days of which I can speak from personal knowl- edge) rather cautious and reserved, and that for three reasons. It did not wish to appear to favor any par- ticular British firm more than any other. A sense of dignity made it desire to stand apart from the pecu- niary interests its citizens were trying to push, though it recognized the duty of urging that any vested rights THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE 105 they had honestly acquired should be honestly dealt with. It disliked the Bismarckian methods of letting material considerations affect the lines of general in- ternational policy, and desired its envoys to keep out of the purlieus of backstairs intrigue, which in capitals one could name resemble the dirty lanes of their meaner quarters. Some contracts were probably lost to British citizens, but the character of the nation in international relations was kept at a pretty high level. Several other States maintained the same standard. It has been frequently said of late years that in divers countries the great firms which manufacture muni- tions of war have endeavored to influence military and naval expenditure, and resorted with that purpose to a secret alarmist propaganda, or even tried, devil- ish as such a course would be, to stir up ill feeling be- tween nations, in order to induce governments to pro- pose and legislatures to appropriate large sums of money for such expenditure. This may have happened in countries which it is better not to name I have not sufficient knowledge of the facts to express an opinion but how much practical effect it may have had is another question. If the thing was ever at- tempted in England, which I doubt, I do not believe that the policy of the nation was affected by it. I am pretty certain it did not happen in America. The subject dealt with in this lecture is so large that it has been necessary to omit many facts which would have illustrated both the points already referred to, and some others of less consequence. I must now hasten on to submit concisely the general conclusions arising from a review of the whole matter. The States whose international policy has been 106 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS throughout their history most affected by commercial considerations have been the colonizing and seafaring States. Spain tried to keep all other nations from trad- ing with tropical and South America, and with her possessions in the Far East. Portugal tried to keep other nations out of the East Indies. Both countries showed a singular incapacity for making the most of their transmarine possessions, and did not in the long run gain wealth or strength by their exclusive policy. Though Spain was for a tune enriched, the revenues she drew from Mexico and Peru may have done her more harm than good. Holland managed things better, and has continued not only to hold but to profit by her pos- sessions in the East Indian archipelago. As a country living largely by trade, her home territory small and not very productive, trade ruled her policy, sometimes involving her in strife with her rivals. Commerce had not quite so much to do with French policy, but it was linked with the impulse which a restlessly active and high-spirited nation felt to explore and to acquire terri- tories in the Western Hemisphere. A like impulse led her in the last century into Africa, where, beginning with Algeria, she has now obtained vast stretches of territory, and added to them Madagascar, the greatest of African islands. It is hard to say how far the adven- turous impulse aforesaid, and how far the ambitions of her commercial classes have respectively contributed to this advance. The latter set of considerations has certainly been powerful, and it is now inducing her to spend large sums in developing her recent acquisitions in Morocco. England was more influenced by the desire for trade THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE 107 than was France, but less exclusively so than Holland, because her home territory was larger and she aspired to play a greater part in European politics. Through the eighteenth century trading interests were always present to her statesmen, and how much they had to do with her wars and her treaties is too well known to need illustration. I do not attempt to justify parts of her earlier dealings with China nor some few of her later acts elsewhere, but in these instances the errors in policy which governments had committed and par- liamentary majorities had supported were condemned, and so far as possible reversed by the people when a general election enabled them to deliver their judg- ment. Germany came very late into a field the greater part of which the competing commercial countries had al- ready occupied, but she showed immense energy in making good her position. A party arose which be- lieved that her home industries had much to gain by the acquisition of colonial territories, whence she could draw raw materials and the population whereof would be a valuable market for her goods. In the latter be- lief she was probably mistaken, for generations may pass before African negroes, or Papuan aborigines, could have been sufficiently civilized to buy goods enough to repay Germany for what she had spent on public works in those countries before 1914. But the belief was the foundation on which was built that Colonial party which Bismarck, though personally cold towards it, was obliged to humor in the conduct of foreign policy; and the hope of obtaining economic control of the Asiatic territories of Turkey and devel- 108 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS oping German trade there counted for much in the ostentatious friendship with which the German Em- peror honored Abdul Hamid. Can Governments effect much for the promotion of the trading interests of their citizens? Most historians and economists would have answered this question hi the negative before the German bureaucracy had shown how greatly a constantly official encouragement given to undertakings abroad may stimulate business men to increase their efforts. Yet, much as the Ger- man government achieved, there is reason to believe that commercial classes are everywhere prone to overestimate the worth of official support. British traders used to complain that the Germans went ahead because their envoys in foreign countries were more active than were those of Britain in putting pressure on foreign governments, and French traders com- plained that foreign competitors had a like advantage over themselves in other countries. Both used to ask their Government to interfere when a foreign legisla- ture was raising import duties, though in fact all rep- resentations made by one government to another are thrown away unless some corresponding concession is offered, and a bargain made. When, as a member of the British Parliament, I was urged by my constituents and others to see that representations were addressed to the legislature of some other country deprecating the raising of its tariff on British goods, I always re- plied that such representations would do no good, and might even do harm, for they would be seized upon as confessions that the British exporter wanted to "cap- ture the home market" of the country asked to desist from a fiscal policy which domestic reasons were thought to prescribe. THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE 109 Annexations of the territories inhabited by semi- civilized peoples are often advocated by commercial journals on the ground that they create a new demand for goods. "Trade," it is said, "follows the flag." This may happen if the annexing State excludes other countries from the captured territory by prohibitive tariffs ; but if, as has been stipulated for in most recent treaties between European Powers, no customs bar- riers are erected, the goods that are cheapest and best will win, whatever their country of origin. Neither do political alliances govern the course of trade between allied countries. Political reasons may (as in the case of France and Russia) draw capital to- wards the State whose armed support it is desired to win and retain, but where the matter is one of buying and selling, a French peasant would not pay more for a pound of tallow because it came from friendly Russia, nor a Russian peasant turn away from a cheap German knife because it was German. An experience of many years leads one to believe, first, that Governments accomplish less in the long run for the trading interests of their respective nations than is believed, and, secondly, that they often do harm by inducing their traders to relax their own en- ergy and lose the keenness of their initiative. The dan- gers to a state and a people, which seem almost insep- arable from the mixing of general national policy with the pecuniary interests of business firms or classes are more serious than is commonly realized. Money can exercise as much illegitimate influence in democracies as elsewhere. In some of them it can buy the press, perhaps, also, a section of the legislators. Where the standard of public virtue is fairly high, those who want to get something from a government will not attempt to 110 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS bribe, but will, to use a current expression, "try to get at the press," while also seeking to persuade influential constituents to put pressure on their member, and members to put pressure on Ministers, the object in view being represented as a public interest, whereas it is really the interest of a small group. When the standard is low, the group will approach the private secretary of a Minister, or even a Minister himself. In one European country thirty years ago a bundle of notes would be slipped under a portfolio on the Minis- ter's table, and if a foreign applicant who did not, as the Scripture says, "know the manner of the god of the land," 1 expressed surprise at the unaccountable de- lay in completing the negotiation, the Minister would rattle loose coins in a drawer till the hint was taken. These were coarse methods. Civilized business moves more delicately but not less surely. There are civilized countries in which whoever asks what can be done to guide the politicians and the press in a particular di- rection, is told to get hold of the financiers, because the press influences the Foreign Office and the finan- ciers influence the press, and both influence the poli- ticians. That wars are made by financiers is not gen- erally true, but they have a great hand in negotiations and in fixing the lines of policy, and they sometimes turn it in directions not favorable to true national in- terests. Governments must, of course, consult finan- ciers, and may often not only profit by their advice but make good use of them. A consortium of banks such as has been set up for China may prevent and I think does prevent evils which would arise if each national group intrigued for its own particular interests. There 1 Kings, ch. XVH, v. 26. THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE 111 are upright men, men valuable to a nation, in "high finance," as in other professions. You know them in America as we know them in England. They have their sphere of action necessary to the world. But wherever large transactions involving governments arise, the danger signal for watchfulness should be raised. One of your and our Puritan ancestors wrote three centuries ago a book entitled "Satan's Invisible World Revealed." Satan is always busy where there is money to be made, but the political secrets of his "Invisible World" rarely see the light. The harm the Tempter does is done not merely in beguiling individuals, but in perverting the lines of policy which national honor and interest prescribe. Every Government must de- fend the legal rights of its citizens in commercial as well as in other matters, and secure for them a fair field in the competition that has now become so keen. But the general conclusion which anyone who balances the benefits attained against the evils engendered by the methods that have been generally followed is this, that striking a balance between loss and gain, the less an ex- ecutive government has to do with business and with international finance, the better for the people. LECTURE IV FORCES AND INFLUENCES MAKING FOR WAR OR PEACE HAVING examined the actual relations of European and Asiatic States to one another and indicated the chief commercial and industrial factors that affect those relations, I pass on to consider other forces and influences which, disposing States to be more or less friendly to each other, determine their attitude upon the international stagey * This enquiry resolves itself into a study of the baUses which on the one hand lead to strife, and on,the